On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 02:10:41PM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: Thank you very much for your reply!
> Well, debian has different requirements re licensing of modules. Your > guess may be wrong if HP has provided a propriatary module for the > kernel that e.g. suse has included in its kernel but debian can't > include. For some things (e.g. the nVidia driver), you can still get an > install done and add a module later; for the boot drive that becomes a > bit of a problem :) My plan is to use the 250G harddrive as system drive and use 2x1T dardrives to do RAID 1 backup for several other servers. So what do you mean by 'for the boot drive'? > > So-called 'fake' raid is, as I understand it, hardware that allows you > to configure the raid in the bios, but the actual raid happens in > windows software rather than in the hardware. > Could you please explain 'in windows software' a little bit? Does that means the processing for raid is done in CPU rather that in the RAID controller? > > And the server will merely be used for backup. > > A couple of issues then. > > 1. Performance may or may not be an issue, depending on how many > other computers will be using the server for data backup at the > same time. three linux servers(1 development server 1 mail and web server and 1 misc server) will be backing up their data to the back up server I purchase. > > 2. With hardware raid, unless the raid card can save the > configuration to each disk in the array, if something happens to > the card (which could happen if a drive fails and takes down the > controller), then the whole array could be caput if you put in a > new controller card. So this must be the downside of using hardware RAID? > > 3. With software raid, the configuration is on the disk itself. > Pop those disks in a new box and they should work (assuming that > the new box's hardware can be booted by the old box's initrd). This is great! > > 4. Hardware raid comes into its own with exotic raid types (e.g. > raid50 or raid60), with hot spares, hot swap, auto rebuild, etc. I will only use raid 1, that is because this is simple and effective as it appears. > > 5. There has been some talk recently here on the increased > liklyhood of raid failue after a single drive failure. > Apparently, the time it takes for a replacment second drive to > rebuild makes the liklihood of the other drive failing before > the rebuild is complete of some concern with very large drive > sizes. In this case, having three active raid1 drives with a > hot spare (4 drives total) is one way to mitigate this risk. This is alarming, I will do more research to come up with a plan. > > You may need to do lots of research depending on: > > 1. The size of your backup set I will do a careful check and estimate later on. > > 2. The importance of the data mailing list archives, web data, database, svn repos.. home directories.. They are very important and I can not afford to lose any of them. > > 3. The number of locations of the backup data. > What do you mean by this? Is it ok to put all of the backup in one backup server? Again, Thank you very much! Regards, -- Zhengquan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
