>>>> "JW" == Jimmy Wales
<jwales(a)bomis.com> writes:
JW> With software RAID, we can do RAID 5, so that our 3x36 can
JW> work as 72GB.
JW> So, I think that's what we should do.
A couple of things:
* Software RAID in Linux is notoriously bad for disk I/O.
* It's also surprisingly intolerant of bad blocks on drives. This
shouldn't normally be a problem, but it can be a problem if more
than one drive in the set has a bad block (not that uncommon). My
experience has been that if one drive fails, reassembling the RAID
set can fail due to minor errors on the other drives.
EVMS (
http://evms.sourceforge.net/) is a very nice enhancement for
Linux volume management, and may be worth looking at. It's a hassle to
set up (unless you're using Gentoo, which has it built-in), but it's
got good buzz and might be helpful. It also has bad-block reallocation
-- a nice feature.
~ESP
--
Evan Prodromou <evan(a)wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel -
http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide