[plug] RAID, and what it can't solve

[William Kenworthy]

The bit I have picked up on is "Western Digital" and two disks failing. 
Any idea of the cause of failure (and is there a question mark over
these disks as to reliability?)  I am thinking of getting some new,
bigger disks ...

BillK

On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 07:08, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Hi folks
> 
> I thought I'd drop a note to remind anyone considering RAID that it's
> not total data protection. Backups, backups, backups.
> 
> Why do I mention this now? Because I just had my own paranoia borne out
> by a double disk failure in a 4 disk RAID 5 array. Darn thing was half
> way through rebuilding onto the hot spare when the second disk died. The
> array is only two days old, too - 4x250GB SATA Western Digital disks, +
> hot spare.
> 
> Thankfully, I keep system snapshots on SATA disks (mmm... hot swap) in
> addition to tape backups, and of course I'd just updated the snapshot
> when migrating from the old array. I was able to make a fresh snapshot
> off the degraded array before trying to rebuild - just in case something
> might've been misssed - so didn't lose even a tiny bit of data.
> 
> --
> Craig Ringer
> 
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