On 7/14/06, auditodd at comcast.net <auditodd at comcast.net> wrote: > > -------------- 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. > I personally run a number of MD soft raid arrays and have found them to be mostly stable. Biggest one is a 1tb raid5 array spread across 6 250g sata drives, one is a 600g array spread across 3 320g drives. The only problem i've ever had with linux md raid is when the array fills up! I've actually gotten some kernel segfaults in that situation. The array has always been fine though- just had to do a rebuild. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20060714/8d179829/attachment.htm