> In the 3 weeks since installing Linux software raid-5 (3 x 80 GB), I had to
> reinitialize the raid devices twice (mkraid --force)...once due to an abrupt
> shutdown and once due to some weird ATA/ATAPI/drive problem that caused a
> disk to begin "clicking" spasmodically...and left the raid array all out of
> whack..
>
> Linux software raid seems very fragile and very scary to recover. I feel a
> much stronger need for backup with raid than without it.
I'm happy to say my experience has been better, when swraid was a patch I
built a kernel:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 763429 Dec 14 1999 k2.2.13s3r
And set up a four drive RAID-0+1. It has recovered from every problem with
nothing more that a hot add. You certainly have had bad luck, but I don't
think it's typical.
The situation when a drive fails and the system stays up seems to be
pretty good, back in the days of 340MB IDE drives I tested it more than I
wanted;-) As you note, recovery if the system goes down is somewhat
painful and manual.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/