3 Oct
2004
3 Oct
'04
11:34 p.m.
On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Rob O'Donnell wrote:
Yeah, this has kept me
wondering, too, even when it broke last time.
barracuda
7200rpm 8mb cache 160gb unit.
Is this going to be the only drive in the machine? (The only problem, as with any RAID, is when you have
to swap a drive and
need to get a new one to match - I have found even the same model of drive
from the same manufacturer, purchased at different times can report
different capacities!)
This is not true. Especially with decent SCSI or SATA based
controllers,
one only needs to match the "surviving" drive(s) with a drive of AT LEAST
the same capacity. If you have a RAID5 set of four 4.3GB drives, and
drive #2 dies, you *can* without problems replace it with a 9.1G drive,
and the array will be back up. The new drive will only have 4.3G of
it used. This was actually a normal procedure to replace old drives
with new drives in production arrays.. just replace them one at a
time.
Controllers that require identical drives in any RAID set are not worth
the consideration in a (semi-)critical environment, as identical
replacements are not a given.
In Jay's case, I'd recomment implementing a SATA-based RAID1 set
with two SATA 160G drives- possibly with a third one as offline
or online (if the controller supports it) spare.
--f