On 26 Jul 2009, at 11:46, Grant wrote:
... What if I bought a low-price/low-capacity SSD drive for each of these systems, installed the system essentials on them, and used my existing high-capacity HD drives for data storage? Would each system keep running if the HDs died? If so, I think that would offer as good or better system reliability than RAID1. What do you think?
You don't need to buy SSD "drives" - instead you could use CF cards and a cheap adaptor. These are commensurate in capacity & cost with USB flash drives (4gig, maybe 16gig?), but CF cards "talk EIDE" and you can get cheap pin-convertors allowing you to connect them to EIDE cables and treat them like a hard-drive.
I know of these used in Asterisk based PABX systems & PoS tills with the expectation that they're more reliable than disks, and have read statements by people deploying quantities of such machines that they've never had a failure in years of use.
I don't know how that really compares to RAID 1 - if you use hardware RAID (and you can get hardware SATA controllers for £50 these days) then you can assign a hot-spare, and hot-swap a replacement drive with zero downtime. With hardware RAID you can still boot if one of the drives fails, but you do add the controller as a potential point-of- failure.
Stroller.
