[Wylug-discuss] Help needed with 'failed' Linux software RAID 10

[Martyn Ranyard]

Hi Dave,

  I've not wanted to weigh in too early on this one because it can sound
patronising to say "you don't need that", but a thought did occur to me when
I read your last paragraph

On 25 June 2010 22:31, Dave Fisher <wylug-discuss at davefisher.co.uk> wrote:
>
> In short, I don't 'need' all those videos, but I do 'want' ready
> access to them ... and CDs/DVDs won't 'cut it'.
>

Which I can completely understand - I too like to keep multimedia, often far
longer than needed, just because I want to.  However, that kind of
multimedia data is indeed not the kind of thing that raid is needed for - if
you have a secure backup (be it DVDs, cloudspace like amazon s3 or another
known solid archive), you may want to consider just using consumer-grade
hard-disks in non-raid form.

One of my back-burner projects (of too many to mention) is a HFS system, I
don't know if it'll ever get finished but I did get to proof of concept.
 This is what is used in hospitals for their high-resolution imaging systems
- files are cached locally for a specific time period and then soft-offlined
(nearlined) to archive storage when they are not being accessed and more
space is needed in the cache.  The result is slow access of archived data
but if the systems are written correctly, there is predictability and the
files can be pre-fetched.

Okay, that seems off on a huge tangent, but what it seems you might be
looking for is a (somewhat manual) version of that - RAID for data that's
not archivable and cache-backed archive for stuff you want ready access to
but doesn't warrant the cost (and headaches that you've experienced twice
already) of raid.

Hopefully food for thought anyway.

--
Martyn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wylug-discuss/attachments/20100625/177935c2/attachment.htm