2 hard drives, to stripe or not to stripe
Well, I'm at work. and what's the problem? One of my developers had 2 hard drives in a striped raid. Basically this means that data is written across both hard drives like this:
hard drive 1 hard drive 2
| File 1--------------| | -------------- File 2 |
| ----------------File| | 3 ----------------- |
etc. This is really efficient, because when you access a file you can read from both hard disks at one time, basically doubling your read rate. The problem is, with only 2 hard drives, there's no parity. Basically, this means that if one of your hard drives fail, you lose both. There's no protection, no back up hard disk with extra data, nothing. it's fucked. Not only does this double your read and write speeds, but it also doubles your potential for failure with no recourse.
Personally, in this kind of environment I would have mirrored the hard drives, so that when it writes a file, it writes the file to both drives exactly the same. This doesn't impact performance much, since it can do both drives at the same time, and also it decreases your failure potential by a little less than half. This is much safer in a production environment.
Sadly, since I was not the one who setup the majority of these computers, a little over half of our workstations are operating on striped raids, and they're all slowly crashing. This makes the developers unhappy, as they more than likely lose work when this happens, but also makes me unhappy, as I get to come in at 11:30 at night to work for several hours on fixing them.
Anyways, that's my rant. I'm looking forward to this weekend. Nothing but sitting around the house, maybe having a few drinks, and Diablo 2 with the girlfriend. Hopefully no other dev machines break between now and closing tomorrow.
hard drive 1 hard drive 2
| File 1--------------| | -------------- File 2 |
| ----------------File| | 3 ----------------- |
etc. This is really efficient, because when you access a file you can read from both hard disks at one time, basically doubling your read rate. The problem is, with only 2 hard drives, there's no parity. Basically, this means that if one of your hard drives fail, you lose both. There's no protection, no back up hard disk with extra data, nothing. it's fucked. Not only does this double your read and write speeds, but it also doubles your potential for failure with no recourse.
Personally, in this kind of environment I would have mirrored the hard drives, so that when it writes a file, it writes the file to both drives exactly the same. This doesn't impact performance much, since it can do both drives at the same time, and also it decreases your failure potential by a little less than half. This is much safer in a production environment.
Sadly, since I was not the one who setup the majority of these computers, a little over half of our workstations are operating on striped raids, and they're all slowly crashing. This makes the developers unhappy, as they more than likely lose work when this happens, but also makes me unhappy, as I get to come in at 11:30 at night to work for several hours on fixing them.
Anyways, that's my rant. I'm looking forward to this weekend. Nothing but sitting around the house, maybe having a few drinks, and Diablo 2 with the girlfriend. Hopefully no other dev machines break between now and closing tomorrow.