<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Steve Hodge <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:stevehodge@gmail.com">stevehodge@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:47 AM, James Oltman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cnlibmyth@gmail.com" target="_blank">cnlibmyth@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Just be sure to get good quality hardware/cables. I'm currently suffering through an array loss due to either faulty PCI cards, cables, or possibly a bad drive/s. I had a drive go out in my RAID 5 and sent it to Seagate for an RMA. They took their sweet time getting one back to me. The very same day the replacement arrived, the array took another dump. I wasn't able to get it to resync.</blockquote>
<div><br>That is the danger of RAID5. It degrades to RAID0 so you are really vulnerable until it has resync'd with the new drive. If you don't have a way of backing up your array I'd recommend against RAID5 - go with RAID6 or RAID10 instead.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br>Steve<br></div></div>
<br></blockquote></div><br>Well fellow Mythers, I lucked out. BIG TIME. I'll just say again how much I _love_ Linux. As you are aware, I had 2 drives fail with Bad/No Superblock info. I was able to recreate the superblocks, but the drives would keep losing them. So I went to #hardware on <a href="http://irc.freenode.net">irc.freenode.net</a>. They advised me to use the SystemRescueCD and ddrescue the drives to images on a network. Well that took nearly 5 days to complete. Once that was done, I brought the machine into work and was able to get the array going again. I dumped up all my data to a server with some space. Then I grabbed the box last night, took it home, and managed to get the array going again. I "hot plugged" the new drive into the system in a port I knew would be the last drive "letter" if you will (/dev/sdg is the last hard drive device). I then added the drive back to the array and it rebuilt over night with no problem. Now, I'm going to grab another 500GB drive and replace the second faulty drive in the array and let it rebuild again. Once this is all said and done, I can safely go back and delete my backups at work. Now, I'll just have to come up with a bunch of drives at home so I can manually back everything up. Anyway, long story, but I'm very grateful for the assistance I had on IRC and the comments here. Thanks guys/girls!<br>
<br>Jim<br>