-------------- Original message ---------------------- From: "John T. Hoffoss" <john.t.hoffoss at gmail.com> > On 7/14/06, auditodd at comcast.net <auditodd at comcast.net> wrote: > > I just started to play with FreeNAS. > > If you have an old PC laying around, it works fairly well. > > > > My advice though, forget software RAID. Too unstable. > > I had 3 80Gig drives set up with software RAID5 and we lost > > power Monday night (yeah I know, I should have had it on a > > UPS). RAID go bye-bye! :-) A quick Google of the situation > > showed that it just wasn't worth my time to try and recover > > the RAID or data since the data was backed up elsewhere. > > Why/How did the RAID fail? was it mid-write or something? Shouldn't > that come out fine, as if they had been three separate drives in the > first place? I've never done a lot of reading up on it, but I was > under the impressions software RAID worked just fine. I'm not sure "how" it failed. I noticed it was down and powered it back up, then my stepson mentioned that the power had gone out the night before. After it came up, I logged in and the RAID was "offline" so I tried to restart it and it said it was already starting up. So I let it sit overnight and the next day it was started, but the mount point was hosed. I can't remember exactly what I found via Google, but I thought the heck with it. A couple sites that I found via Google mentioned that software RAID was still buggy and unreliable (yeah, yeah I know, don't believe everything your read in forums). I also found the data transfer speed onto the software RAID to be a bit slow, about half as fast as an FTP or copy onto a regular Samba shared folder/drive. I copied a 4Gig DVD ISO image to and from the software RAID and it took at least twice as long to finish compared to the Samba share I had on my Linux server, which was the same make/model of 80Gig drive, but not in a software RAID. -- ---- ------ Todd Young