[KLUG Members] RE: RAID 5 with hot spare

[John Pesce]

Thanks for the feedback guys. When I lost two drives in my RAID 5, I did 
have a hot spare. The problem was that one died, it started rebuilding to 
the spare, and the second drive failed. Rebuild over, array toast, end 
of story :( Well almost, I left out the administration flips out.
This was double so because it was a 1TB array and the data was not backed 
up. Not because I'm lazy, but because it takes a week to create the 
processed data from the raw data and the intermiediate data is 
useless.

Which brings me to a second RAID 5, also with hot spare and different 
brand hard drive. The group would like to mirror the two RAID5s, but 
Adaptec and Promise says it can't be done and won't help. 
So I appreciate the ideas so far about perhaps rsync and LVM. I'm trying 
to figure out to make it happen.

I can see copying new or changed files, but what about removing deleted 
files. There must be a straight forward way to do this.

Thanks

 On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Bob Kanaley 
wrote:

> I lost two drives in a SCSI RAID 5 array on a samba file server about two
> months ago. The end users never knew anything had happened. About a year

> >
> >How about RAID 5 with a hot spare?  That will protect you from
> >sequential failures, and it will be less costly than (And, I think, less
> >messy) than trying to software mirror two arrays.