[BC] RAID servers

[tg at btsg.com]

I use a lot of RAID 1 with a hot standby drive in the machine (Spare Drive).  So far it has worked
O.K.  You have to be careful when working on it though.  I have removed the defective drive and
rebooted and had it come back to life in a few minutes of rebuilding.  I now setup all my
workstations this way.  The DELL controllers allow the spare drive configuration off the
motherboard as do many others.  I don't know how it is going to work out long term, but I also have
two servers running a USB RAID 5 with hot spare drives (6 drives) using a USB RAID Chassis with 6
SATA drives in them.  Two years and counting.  Now I do not have the OS on the4se bbut they are
great for additional storage.  The Audiovault machines like them so far.

FWIW: When you get RAID form DELL, preconfigured, they put the OS on a partition.

Tommy Gray

----- Original Message -----
From: towers at mre.com

On our HP file servers, we tried RAID 1 (mirrored). We lost a drive and
the machine became a door stop when we tried to install a new drive and
have it reformat. It took a complete reload of the OS and reconfigure to
bring it back to life.

RAID isn't all it's cracked up to be when used as a C drive......

MM

 >> RAID works wonders in preventing many situations like this.  That still
 >> is
 >> not an excuse for proper backups though to protect from a controller
 >> failure, or the machine bursting into flames, etc.
 >>
 >> B
 >
 > them with one being off site. So, RAID prevents downtime on a drive
 > failure, but, in my application, seems more trouble than it's worth. At
 > work, though, we're working on digital cinema servers and need RAID to get
 > the required throughput. That's not my department, though...
 >
 > Harold