Re: Cheapest way to acheive RAID5 ?

[LeeUKHA <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, but...

I would start slowly buying drives now from different suppliers...
...if you buy a job lot that all came from the same batch the likelihood
is that they could all fail at the same time (all made at the same time
from the same components and subjected to the same thumps and bumps?)...
Look back though the archive and you'll see a lot of horror stories
about multiple drive failure taking entire RAIDs out...

Depending on your paranoia, you can run RAID5 with 'hot standbys',
drives that are connected but unused and spun down, ready to jump in
when things start to go wrong...

It's also worth pointing out that DVDR's are only 15p each now, and are
probably the most indestructible way to back up movies...

Lee

> Lee,
>
> Indestructible no, but it should be more resilient? Obviously with two
> disks failing at the same time you're stuffed but you shouldn't lose
the
> lot from a single failure, should you?
> I guess buying n+1 disks initially will then give you an spare for
> instant replacement on failure of the first drive and good spares
> management would mean you'd then buy a new spare to replace the one
> you've just installed (and hope you don't get another failure 'til
it's
> delivered).
>
> Have I interpreted that right?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tim.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: LeeUKHA
> >
> > I think there's some confusion here, just because it's RAID5
> > doesn't mean it's indestructible...