[Sussex] AMD Sempron Chips and BIG backups

[Ronan Chilvers]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:53:46 +0000
Alan Pope <alan.pope at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Where did you get them?
> 
> Ebuyer.
> 
> http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=81601
> 
> > What make?
> 
> Seagate Barracuda. The link above is the 300GB ones.
> 

Funnily enough I was looking at that exact drive earlier today.  Good
are they?

> > How come not raid5?
> 
> Why not mirroring? :)

Indeedy!  We use mirroring now.  But you get cheaper, larger, redundant
disk space with raid5 than you do with mirroring don't you?

> I plan to have 3 2-port controllers with 6 disks in one machine. Disk
> 0 and 1 in controller 0. Disk 0' and 2 on controller 1, and disk 1'
> and 2 on controller 3. That way if any single disk or single drive
> fails I'm okay. I could actually survive with two disk failures
> depending which ones of course.

So you up a bit on raid5, so long as you're lucky! :-)  1.5 drives can
fail and you're ok!!??!!

What do you think of linux software raid?  I've found it works well,
but only used it on a _very_ small scale.

> > I've been reading about XFS and like the fact that it handles large
> > files well, but ext3 has a better reputation for data integrity as
> > far as I can see.
> 
> I don't think it matters really. They're all pretty much the same from
> a data integrity point of view. Performance is probably the key factor
> for you I guess?

Yes, but primarily I want safe data.  Been reviewing filesystems just
because the volume sizes are likely to be very large with very large
individual files and XFS apparently sneaks ahead in that kind of
environment in terms of speed.  I suppose I should just put
together some test filesystems and try to break them.

> Reiser and ext3 are both good filesystems.

Although ReiserFS (don't know about Reiser4) seems more suited to lots
of small files and there are a good few reports of data corruption with
it.  Also it is apparently hard to recover from a failure, while ext3
it seems (in the words of my server provider) 'has the sturdiest
recovery tools and will make a valid filesystem out of nearly any
random byte soup'...

> Whether you do snapshots or not, LVM is a Good Thing for managing
> disk space.

Yes, indeedy!  Thanks for the tips! Much obliged!

Cheers
-- 
Ronan
e: ronan at thelittledot.com
t: 01903 739 997
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