Stupid RAID question

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Andrej Marjan <andrej-igvx78u1SeH3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org>

| with 2 drives in a RAID 1 setup with drives from different batches or
| manufacturers.

Yeah.  And soon there will only be two manufacturers, so good luck in
diversity in systems larger than 2 disks.

If you really have an IDE / PATA interface, I wonder about putting
/boot on a Compart Flash device and using one of those inexpensive
gizmos that allows them to be plugged into PATA.  Apparently not all
of them support DMA which may matter.  /boot isn't used after booting
so the small capacity wouldn't matter and the physical space and power
would be small.  Besides, it would be easy to have another in your
desk as a spare.

Note that most current consumer hard drives are not suitable for RAID.
The can take a large amount of time doing internal error recover,
enough that the RAID system decides the whole drive is dead.  That is
a practical disaster because rebuilding an array on a 2TB disk takes a
large portion of a day.  See for example:
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery>
This is a scam as far as I'm concerned.  Perpetrated by the last two
surviving drive manufacturers.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists