Value of RAID Arrays for hard drives

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lorneyb2
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2011/04/08 19:40:00 (permalink)

Value of RAID Arrays for hard drives

I have had 10 days of trouble shooting and repairs that I have finally worked my way through.  What was ultimately the problem was that 2 hard drives were failing simultaneously.  One external, the other internal as part of the RAID Array.  I was getting spikes in my DPC Latency checker that would go right to the top intermittently and of course disrupt playback recording etc.  I went through the process of  isolating the problem by disabling/enabling  components but could never  isolate a single cause but did get modest improvement by disabling the 1 external hard drive.  I copied all the data on it over to another drive and reformatted it.  Better but still problems.  I then changed the Power supply and heat sink/fan as there were slightly elevated readings there. Got slightly better but still not fully resolved. 

Finally yesterday I got an error message pointing to one of the drives in the RAID Array.  I simply replaced the drive with a new one and then it rebuilt all the missing info automatically.  It works as if it is a perpetual back-up system.  If any one of the three drives fails it is simply a matter of replacing the failed drive and rebuilding the files from its own utility.


Final outcome was 2 failed drives, 0 lost data.  Its  wonderful day.

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    osd
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    Re:Value of RAID Arrays for hard drives 2011/04/08 21:48:41 (permalink)
    I'd be very nervous if I lost two drives so closely together, especially since they were on different controllers.

    And since throwing out 'raid' by itself is a misnomer, let's break down RAID levels.

    RAID 0 - striping, no parity. No matter the size of the array, any single drive failure will result in loss of the array.

    RAID 1 - mirroring. Two disks, where writes to one are duplicated on the 2nd disk. Can tolerate either drive failing without data loss, but at a 100% storage "cost".

    RAID 5 - striping with parity. Has the performance gains of RAID 0, but can tolerate a drive failure without data loss.

    The higher RAID levels are beyond the budget of a home studio, and unnecessary in my mind. Ultimately any RAID can fail horribly, if you've ever lost 2 drives on a RAID 5, or had a controller go bonkers and toast data. If one's dwelling catches fire, a RAID 100 will go up in flames as quickly as anything else.

    OFFSITE backup solutions are key in my book. 50GB storage is $50 annually with Amazon's new cloud service. It's marketed as an mp3 storage locker, but I've been able to upload SONAR files into the "my documents" folder without any problem. 

    Edit: Oh, and I'm glad all your data came back. It is pretty cool seeing a RAID system rebuild from parity.
    post edited by osd - 2011/04/08 21:49:52
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