RE: External Hard drive enclosures for storage

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dean Smith [mailto:dean@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 19 January 2005 19:17
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] External Hard drive enclosures for storage

<<SNIP>>

> If I could use a 4 bay firewire enclosure , 4 x 250Gb drives
> to give a single 750Gb volume using Software raid 5 , I'd be
> slightly happier. I'm not after ultimate performance at all,
> I rarely have more than 1 client accessing the server at any
> time, but ability to survive a disk failure would be good.
>
> Dean

Please be aware that when I tried software RAID5 on the external firewire
drives under 2003 Server I couldn't get it to work in any way, shape or
form
reliably ... As soon as I tried to format the array I would get random
errors cropping up all over with drives immediately being marked out as bad
and offline / unreachable. I assumed that it was the drives failing as they
are fairly old but having since thrashed them almost to oblivion with not
an
error to be found I reckon it *HAS* to be Microsofts RAID5 implementation
or
the firewire drive handling barfing somewhere.

I assume that this is why they don't enable support for such under XP /
2003
Server unless you go in and feck with the settings in the registry.

Running striped / spanned / mirrored however all worked absolutely fine for
me under 2003 Server - one hint though, turn *OFF* all write caching in the
external drives. When you get into some seriously heavy disc accesses then
with caching enabled you will find you get "Delayed write failed"
errors
which result in the drives going inaccessible until you reboot the machine.
Turning off write caching cures all that.

Phil

Phil