[Novalug] best hard disk setup for home file server?

Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org
Wed Oct 14 16:46:15 EDT 2009


I didn't say either way.  That was someone else (?).

I only said that any drive has 2-32MiB DRAM that is volatile.
If the system is interrupted, it may result in data loss because
the drive did not actually commit to disk, and it was mid-commit
from its own DRAM buffer (unless it is disabled for write buffering).

But most of the time, any meta-data journaling filesystem will
keep the meta + writes ordered well, and can recover.  If it
was touching MD or LVM meta, then there could be issues.
It all depends.

The concept of things like TLER is to work with an intelligent
RAID card to ensure any flushes from the drive's volatile RAM
are completed.  It's not fool proof either.

----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Ertel <richard.ertel@gmail.com>

i still don't understand if using a non-TLER drive (like a wd caviar
green, or blue or black, for that matter) is a no-no for MD-RAID-5. if
using a TLER drive with MD-RAID is pointless, then i won't do it, as
it costs way more. what i do need, are drives that cooperate with
MD-RAID-5 (or rather, that MD-RAID-5 won't drop out of the array).



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