On Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 12:50:16PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I've also had a couple which have developed a few bad blocks before rapidly deteriorating into uselessness, again I've had ample time to remove all imprtant data before the end.
Yes and that is fine as long as you are monitoring such things. But in my experience it is far better to have systems that have a degree of tolerance to failures than to rely on something or someone noticing an impending failure (In a perfect world you have both)
The trouble then is that you don't know that half your fault-tolerant RAID array is dead until the other half dies as well, the fault toleration may mask the underlying failures.
It's horses for courses anyway, I don't have a need for an ultra reliable 24/7 system, I *do* need to protect some data quite carefully (company accounts and such). To protect the data I copy off-site in two ways, one to my hosting provider's system and the other CDs in the garage. If my Linux box expired totally tomorrow I'd possibly lose 24 hours of business data (easily redone) and some time to build a new system.