[SGVLUG] scary RAID 5 going going .. soon 2 be gone?

[Matt Campbell]

Does anyone want to do a meeting on backups?  I would find it useful!

I have a 10T array at home I would hate to lose, and I know of no reasonably
priced backup for it.  I was counting on the RAID to protect things....

Matt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net [mailto:sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net] On
> Behalf Of Claude Felizardo
> Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 5:02 PM
> To: SGVLUG Discussion List.
> Subject: Re: [SGVLUG] scary RAID 5 going going .. soon 2 be gone?
> 
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 9:26 PM, matti <mathew_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > well not quite, however you want to read this
> > article
> >
> > summary:
> > As Hard Drives get larger, and unrecoverable read error (URE) rate
> > remains about the same, the chances of being able to recover from a
> > disk drive failure on a RAID 5 system goes down (i.e failure rate
> increases )...
> > so much so that you may expect to not be able to reliably recover.
> >
> > scary math, especially considering what a PITA it is to backup large
> amounts of data.
> >
> > Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009
> > http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162
> >
> > best
> > matti
> 
> Yeah, this article and a bunch of articles warning about RAID came out
> in 2007 and it's been on my mind since I use both RAID-1 and 5
> partitions in my fileserver at home.  Most of my important stuff is
> backed up on other computers but there's quite a bit of stuff I
> wouldn't want to lose but is it's kinda difficult to backup
> automatically such as my favorite TiVo recordings.  I've had various
> failures over the years that either took the system down completely or
> just the big RAID partitions.  It's a pain to rebuild since it
> requires commands you type in only once in a while and it takes so
> darn long to run that I've been contemplating moving my data to an
> external network device.
> 
> Right now I've got three 500 GB SATA drives partitioned as follows:
> three RAID-1 w/ hot spare on different disks for /boot, / and /alt
> (same size as the 2nd for previous/next OS install) and one big giant
> RAID-5 with LVM for /home, /export (my shared files and /.private for
> the rsnapshot backups)  Yeah, I really would like something like ZFS
> for the flexibility of resizing partitions and snapshotting.
> 
> At this point, would I be better off adding a 4th drive as a hot spare
> or rebuild for RAID-6 for protection against data loss in case a 2nd
> drive dies while rebuilding?  Actually are there tools to convert
> RAID-5 into RAID-6?
> 
> Has anyone looked into any of those online backup services?  Looks
> like there's Mozy or Carbonite?  I assume they don't support Linux
> partitions so can you configure these things to backup your network
> shares as well?  Assuming you want to spend the days to back things up
> initially...
> 
> What about those 1-touch backup drives from the various drive
> manufacturers?  Does anything support Linux w/ 1-touch so it will get
> done?  Right now I have to plug in an external drive, mount the
> various partitions and copy stuff manually, disconnect, etc.  During
> the summer or at least during heat waves I have to use an external fan
> blowing on both the fileserver and external  drive box because these
> things get hot when you run them for hours at a time.
> 
> claude