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ebus - what you were saying about doing two raid ones and joining those together with a zero, that's a raid 10. Very cool, just more expensive because you need twice the drives for capacity.
RAID 0 definitely has it's place. In load balanced environments, like we have for some of our clients, it might look something like 3 to 5 identical servers each running on a RAID 0. If one of the servers RAID fails it's not a big deal, the others pick up the load until a replacement can be put online. That's a sweet setup for speed. But, it would still be incomplete without a backup.
RAID 5 instability doesn't have to have anything to do with the technicians supporting it. Even with great techs, two drives can fail at once or a controller can equally screw up and cause data loss or complete failure. A better than average RAID 5 would have an additional hot-spare in the configuration so that when a problem is encountered time is less of the essence.
RAID 1 is practical for medium and low volume servers if it's configured properly. This has two drives mirroring. What you lose is some performance... also, it's not really a backup. If data on a drive gets corrupted then that just gets replicated to the other drive. So, the lesson is
always the same - have a backup.
My advice is always the same:
1) Have a backup locally and if possible, have one at your host too.
2) Do routine checks on drive and volume health so that you can spot the "average" problem from a mile away. Much better to be fixing something before it breaks!
Brad
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President at MojoHost | brad at mojohost dot com | Skype MojoHostBrad
71 industry awards for hosting and professional excellence since 1999
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