Happy Fun Hardware

Okay, at 1:30 AM my ADSL dropped out and wouldn't come back. Not the end of the world, it was almost time for bed anyway.

At 4:18 AM /dev/hde in Yuri, my Linux box, had an unrecoverable error. Fortunately, I'm running RAID-0. Because if I'd been running RAID-5, I might have lost everything.

You see, if Linux detects an error on a software RAID-0 volume, it will forcibly unmount the volume and then attempt to remount it read-only. If it sees an error on a software RAID-5 volume, it will remove that device from the raidset... Even if it has already failed a disk out. In which case it will reduce your ~~anime collection~~ precious data to Purina Computer Chow.

So I now have a 1TB read-only disk. I can reboot, and it will almost certainly come back okay. Almost certainly. And anyway, it's mostly backed up. On 231 DVD-Rs.

Might as well get started backing up the rest.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:13 AM

Comments

1 So why are you leaving a bad drive in a Raid5? Of Course when two drives in a Raid5 go bad, the data is lost. How could it be otherwise? How could any other program handle it better?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward at August 12, 2004 11:17 AM (8+XGc)

2 The problem is, it doesn't take a total drive failure for Linux to drop a drive out of a RAID-5 set. A bad sector will do. Or a transient write error. Two of those, and bye-bye data.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 12, 2004 11:24 AM (+S1Ft)

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