From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mx1.redhat.com (mx1.redhat.com [172.16.48.31]) by int-mx1.corp.redhat.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id jBIBjQ125193 for ; Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:45:26 -0500 Received: from skippy.fini.net (skippy.fini.net [205.166.143.75]) by mx1.redhat.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id jBIBjFcB013447 for ; Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:45:20 -0500 Received: from skippy.fini.net (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by skippy.fini.net (8.13.4/8.13.4) with ESMTP id jBIBirDY021457 for ; Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:44:58 -0500 Received: from localhost (chicks@localhost) by skippy.fini.net (8.13.4/8.13.4/Submit) with ESMTP id jBIBir0k021453 for ; Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:44:53 -0500 Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:44:53 -0500 (EST) From: Christopher Hicks Subject: Re: [linux-lvm] Re: If one disk fails i loose everything? In-Reply-To: <1134502870.14744.51.camel@seki.nac.uci.edu> Message-ID: References: <200512131624.jBDGO5ui009897@cichlid.com> <439F07E3.80804@cox.net> <1134502870.14744.51.camel@seki.nac.uci.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: LVM general discussion and development List-Id: LVM general discussion and development List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: LVM general discussion and development On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Dan Stromberg wrote: > It really shouldn't work that way. RAID 5 is based on XOR, and I'm > pretty sure XOR can only recover from a single-number failure. > > -But-, if you had a hot spare or warm spare configured, then it would've > been possible for one drive to die, the RAID 5 to be resync'd, another > drive to die, and then still be OK. Correct. One thing to keep in mind when doing these sort of things is that drives from the same manufacturer and lot are more like to fail around the same time than random drives. We've had two drives fail within a week of each other in the same raid array multiple times. I've had a couple of raid arrays where it felt like I spent every other week for six months doing some part of a drive replacement and ending up replacing the whole array my the time its done. Now if I have two drives fail in an array in short I proactively replace the entire thing. Don't forget the I in raid means you're trying to make cheap sh*t reliable. -- The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -- Albert Einstein