SUMMARY: Linux software RAID experiences

[Sven Heinicke <sven@research.nj.nec.com>]

Well, it seems I'm not the only one who has had issues with Linux
software RAID5.  In general the solution peopel used was to switch to
hardware RAID.  Some people have had good experience, but of the 15 or
so replies I got there was only one or two of thoes.

So we gave up on software RAID5.  If we buy new systems I will suggest
hardware RAID5.  People have had success with RAID0 and RAID1 though.
With both Ext3 and ReiserFS.  I was using ReiserFS.

Had have 4 systems, each with like 1.5T of disk space.  Currently we
only have like 1.6T of data.  So, our plan is to stripe them and then
just rsync the data ever night.  I set up two partitions, RAID
striping and LVM striping, bonnie++ reported LVM striping was a little
faster in most cases and I am using LVM.  

Thanks for all the help,

       Sven

Sven Heinicke writes:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > I have had several bad software RAID5 experiences recently.  On one, a
 > disk want bad and froze up the system.  After a reboot I mounted it
 > read only and was able to copy the data off.  But to test RAID5 we
 > then touched a new file and deleted it and much of the data want away.
 > 
 > Now, this morning, the reset key got accidently hit on a system (don't
 > ask) and whenever the RAID is started the kernel goes Oops.
 > 
 > Out of what was rather a lot of luck, we didn't loose any data, but we
 > are currently scared of our data on other RAID5 partitions.
 > 
 > What experiences have people here had with software RAID, particularly
 > RAID5?  If you have good experiences what tools and hardware where you
 > using?
 > 
 > What Linux solutions have people used?  Particularly for IDE drives as
 > that is what we are currently using and hopping not to reinvest in
 > hard drives, but any solution is will be ok.
 > 
 >      Thanks,
 > 
 > 	Sven
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