On 12 October 2013 13:42, Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk wrote:
The researchers at Berkeley may have originally defined it as "Inexpensive" but in the commercial world it is more generally accepted to stand for "Independent"
For me, the I=Inexpensive bit matters, because it's about saying "buy cheap disks, expect them to fail, build in redundancy so it doesn't matter when they do". Expecting the disks to fail is important, because then the redyundancy is taken seriously - it's not just "a nice to have it just in case but as it'll never happen I won't check it's set up correctly".
If I could, I would buy disks at half the price that failed twice as often and rotate them more frequently. Although in that case I don't think I'd consider RAID5 to be a sufficient level of redundancy.