[Sussex] Recovering from RAID 5

[John Crowhurst]

On Sun, November 7, 2010 18:17, Desmond Armstrong wrote:
> Very difficult if it is not spinning.

You know when you have a spinning drive on a long lead and you move the
drive, there is an inertia. Its the easiest way to tell a drive is
spinning other than pressing your ear to it.

After replacing the power supply last month, replacing a drive this month
made me think the machine is not long for this world. Two of its fans had
seized up and having 4 drives stacked on top of one another is just asking
for trouble.

Sadly, the nature of RAID 5 can handle a single drive failure but is
hardly redundant. I worked out it was an attempt at getting 750GB out of 4
drives.

The company has two backup machines, one in a remote location and one in
the basement, so the data is preserved on the one in the basement. Judging
that both machines are the same obsolete hardware, I may put in a proposal
to scrap the one in the basement as well.

-- 
John Crowhurst
John's Computer Support