I thought I'd take a few minutes to write about an issue I'd seen about a year ago involving raid. A man (lets call him Bob) brought me his computer that was used as an industrial sewing machine server.
Another local company had set him up with with Raid Stripe 0, arrayed accross 5 hard drives. All the Hard Drives were Identical. He had about 800Gb of sewing patterns that he would have been required to repurchase since he never backed up. (a couple thousand dollars)
Lets Explain RAID 0
All that RAID Stripe 0 does is basically look at multiple hard drives as a single drive. It is mainly used to boost performance in a gaming system, where data loss is acceptable.
The reliablility of the RAID Set is equal to the average drive divided by the number of drives. example: I use two hard drives that are good for two years. I have total data loss after six months.
Here's what I did for Bob:
He was running his drives through an IDE PCI Card, so I connected another hard drive on the onboard IDE Bus. I installed Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva) on the new hard drive, and then installed the Linux drivers for the IDE PCI Cards, and was going to use some software to try to rebuild the array. When I rebooted the system, Mandrake rebuilt the array, and made my job easier. As I was baking up the Data, I lost the Array several times, but was able (somehow) to recover all Data uncorrupted. Usually in a recovery like that the data is unusable.
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