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SATA RAID Enclosure w/ Temperature Monitoring?
vanyel asks: "Yesterday, my external USB 2.0 drive enclosure finished cooking a 3/4 full 200G drive after its fan quit working who knows how long ago. In the time honored tradition of closing the barn door *after* the horse has wandered away, I'm accelerating my quest for a RAID solution. In particular, I want something that will support 4 SATA drives and has temperature monitoring that doesn't require a particular vendor's RAID card or Windows. Better yet, is there a RAID-5 NAS that isn't in the $4-5000USD price range. Anyone with a better barn door to close this problem with?"
raid 5 is fine. slower, but not a bad setup if your controller does xor in hw.
Until you have two drives fail. Then, you're fucked. Don't act like that never happens, because it does. I've had it happen, as I'm sure others have. No more RAID5 for me. . .
Until you have two drives fail. Then, you're fucked. Don't act like that never happens, because it does. I've had it happen, as I'm sure others have. No more RAID5 for me. . .
Thats what hot spares are for. Even if you aren't monitoring your arrays.. you are aren't you? One global hot spare per enclosure and you need 3 failed drives before you loose data.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
no array is ever completely fault tolerant.
you STILL need backups.
I'm not sure what the target use is, but it seems like its personal, and being that the previous external drive was only USB, performance does not seem to be a concern.
With that in mind, I would suggest poor man's RAID1 over real RAID1. By that I mean buy two disks and cron a rsync command every night. This would take care of backups and redundancy, although its not realtime, so a disk failure after a disk write but before the rsync would loose your data, but that is very unlikely and if something is that important, extra precautions should be made. In my opinion, real RAIDx is only necessary if uptime is of importance. For personal use, I would guess that a quick switching of disks or mounting another one and making a symlink is OK.
In other words, I agree with the theory of RAID1, but RAID1 + a backup requires at least 3x the storage space. I was looking at getting two Lacie bigdisks (500Gigs) and do this mirroring on them, but after the one died at work, and a quick google search says that most all of the Lacie RAID0 disks rarely survive more than a year, I too am in the market for an enclosure. In looking at the Lacie enclosure, it doesn't take someone too long to figure out why they all fail. The airflow is from front to back and one harddrive is directly in back of the other, so the 2nd drive gets all the heat. Doh!
I would really like for something like the Lacie bigdisk that was properly engineered. I would be comfortable with having about 500Gigs of space for a while.
Okay, so in order to figure out if my drive is going south I need to check the event log every day? WTF?
Yes you do. Its no big deal at least for operating systems that log in plaintext (I don't know about windows). What I do is nightly grep for unusual stuff and I take 30seconds to a minute reviewing it for all of my systems and I admin about a hundred, so one machine should take about 5 seconds or so a day. That is much easier than trying to recreate 250 Gigs of data from a dead drive. Right?