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

Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org
Wed Oct 14 17:07:02 EDT 2009


In general, I avoid MD, especially for anything booting.  But that's just me.

To make matters worse, most of the time most MD issues are caused by
people not understanding MD. 

E.g., people used to blame 3Ware for lack of hot-swap because they
were using 3Ware cards in JBOD mode with MD.  3Ware only supports
hot-swap when it's managing the RAID array (for various reasons, including
the fact that the kernel did not support a "missing device" for a long time
which happens when you use JBOD ;).

The common argument that "I don't want to rely on a hardware vendor
for my data" didn't hold much water with 3Ware, given how open they
were with their RAID volume organization so it could be read without
their cards (e.g., DeviceMapper).  Again, people not knowing what they
are doing.

Although even 3Ware "inits" volumes after a hang/power failure.  By
"init" they mean check the entire volume for consistency, not necessarily
rebuild it (it's still redundant).  It's just good practice.


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

the issue i have read about is that without TLER, a drive takes it's
sweet time recovering from an error which causes MD to drop it from
the array for being non-responsive. then when it responds again, MD
picks it back up, but then starts the rebuilding process.

this sounds like an issue i want to avoid.



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