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- Aug 23, 2004
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I thought I'd mention this, as something to ponder. I had to set up a box for a client who needed a fair bit of space. So in went 6x 2TB drives in a RAID-5 configuration. No problem, right? Wrong!
This presented two problems:
1. Building the RAID took a long time. I'm not sure how many hours - I started it yesterday morning and it finished some time over night. If one of these drives fail while the box is in production, it will take much longer. This means that, should the customer experience a drive failure, they'll be without redundancy for a very long time. Now, I've seen a second drive in an array of 36GB 15krpm drives fail during the time it took to swap out the first failed drive and it rebuilding. That's not a big window. Rebuilding a 7200rpm 2TB drive in a RAID takes a heck of a lot longer. RAID6 of course solves this, but at a rather large performance penalty.
2. On the business side of things, we had to make changes to our SLA to cover the above.
How do you guys deal with these issues?
This presented two problems:
1. Building the RAID took a long time. I'm not sure how many hours - I started it yesterday morning and it finished some time over night. If one of these drives fail while the box is in production, it will take much longer. This means that, should the customer experience a drive failure, they'll be without redundancy for a very long time. Now, I've seen a second drive in an array of 36GB 15krpm drives fail during the time it took to swap out the first failed drive and it rebuilding. That's not a big window. Rebuilding a 7200rpm 2TB drive in a RAID takes a heck of a lot longer. RAID6 of course solves this, but at a rather large performance penalty.
2. On the business side of things, we had to make changes to our SLA to cover the above.
How do you guys deal with these issues?