[OT] Useable BIOS RAID 1 on the cheap?

[John Costello]

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, David Cantrell wrote:
> I use 1TB external firewire disks (which internally use 4 250GB disks,
> striped with no redundancy) because they're cheap.  The one spare means
> that when a disk fails, I can still keep going, with backups, until I
> replace it.  And I need to have *three* failures to lose data.  So after
> two failures (and I've not even had one yet) I'll just turn stuff off,
> on the assumption that a disk that isn't spinning is less likely to
> break.

That is a dangerous assumption.  Disks that have spun for a long time may
not spin up again after a shutdown due to worn components that grind to a
halt when you power them off.  $WORK had a longish enforced shutdown (10
days).  The day after the shutdown, a higher-than-normal number of people 
reported failed hard drives (20-30 compared to the usual 1).  This also 
was a problem when $WORK had regular maintenance shutdowns--servers would 
power down and not return.


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John Costello - cos at indeterminate dot net