Very good rambles!  See my comments (well, rambles) below.

> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: Re: Home Office Server Security
> 
> semi-coherent ramblings follow - I wanted to give you some stuff to
> consider
> 
...
> Use whatever RAID you are comfortable with.  I've tried RAID5 and
> RAID1, and RAID1 is by far the easiest to recover from.  RAID0 is a
> disaster waiting to happen.  Some people have had no problems with
> RAID5, but it seems almost as many find RAID5 such a PITA that they
> swear "never again!"
> 
> I did RAID1 with two drives bought at the same time.  Sure enough one
> drive failed, and I was too busy to address it.  A couple months later
> the other drive failed.  Duh!  Same drive manufacturer, same model,
> almost same manufacture date - yeah, I asked for that.  You might want
> to use different drive manufacturers to mitigate that risk.
> 

Remember the theory behind RAID is that two 'independent' drives will
fail at different times.  Is that a valid assumption? I'm not convinced

The problem with raid 5 is that, in order to recover the array ALL
DRIVES in the array must be 100% functional or your rebuild will fail
and you lost your data anyway.  (of course, if you have more than one
'parity' drive then things are different).

Raid 1 is similar, really, but may not be as fatal if you lose one
block.  I've not tried it nor thought much about that, so I may be
wrong.

The purpose behind 5 is to save money, I think.  The question I have is
- how important is your data?  If it's important enough to want to have
redundancy, why is it not important enough to use RAID 1 with 2 OR MORE
drives?  Too expensive?  Then be certain you have a good backup system!
(Oh, my, look!  A backup system will be another copy of all your data.
Taking the same space (or maybe less because of using gzip or other
compression).  Wow, 2x the disk space! Saved lots of money, did we? :-)
Of course, the backup system can be slower and cheaper drives... wait,
how important was this data???)

Rabbit trail: But the ability to restore a directory you 'oopsed' is
probably worth the cost, and RAID doesn't give you that ability.

So, in summary, I'm saying that almost all decisions are tradeoffs
between cost, risk, time, and probably other stuff.  "You pay your
money, you make your choice" :-)

Rusty
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