[mythtv-users] The Bigger... Disk contest, Fall 2007 edition

Jay R. Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Thu Oct 18 15:53:14 UTC 2007


On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 11:15:30AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 10:56:36AM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Joe Ripley wrote:
> > > My system isn't nearly as large (only 1.5 TB), however, I just wanted
> > > to mention that you don't need a dedicated drive just for booting when
> > > using software RAID.  I usually make my boot drive a RAID1 across all
> > > of my installed disks, just to make sure the system can boot in the
> > > event of multiple drive failure.
> > 
> > Booting off a mirror is ok.  I just get hives whnm people tell me their
> > boot drive is on a RAID 5.
> > 
> > "mak[ing] your boot drive a RAID1 across all your disks" implies two
> > things I can't get my head around: mirroring more than 2 drives, and
> > what I assume is mirroring only single partitions?
> 
> Consider 6 320GB disks, each with 3 partitions:
> 
> filesystem     disk1   disk2  disk3  disk4  disk5  disk6
> / 20GB         mirror  mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror
> swap1 1GB       mirA    mirA                            
> swap2 1GB                      mirB   mirB              
> swap3 1GB                                    mirC   mirC
> /video 299GB   RAID5   RAID5  RAID5  RAID5  RAID5  RAID5
>        x5 
> 
> Any drive can be booted.
> Any drive can fail and the system can continue without data loss
> Most two-drive combos can fail (not 1&2, 3&4, 5&6) and only
>  video will be lost.
> 
> It's not unreasonable.

Maybe not, but it violates the Principle of Least Astonishment rather
badly in at least two dimensions, for a random Linux geek walking up to
repair it...  I try to make my setups "Jay gets hit by a bus"-proof.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                     '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274


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