[olug] 2TB Harddrives On Sale

[Obi-Wan]

> On Saturday 08 May 2010 05:57:55 pm Charles Bird wrote:
> > I know its supposed to work, and does most of the time, but the thing is,
> >  is that no one should be comfortable just because they are RAID, take
> >  those backups whenever you can :)
> 
> You need backups even if RAID works perfectly. RAID can only protect from a 
> very specific sub-category (partial hard drive failures) of a category 
> (hardware failure) of data loss. It does NOT protect against disk/RAID 
> controller failure, nor filesystem bugs that cause corruption, and not 
> remotely the far more common problem of *user error*, accidentally deleting 
> important files or such. RAID covers only a small fraction of what backups 
> cover, in terms of protection from data loss. But RAID isn't *for* protecting 
> against data loss, it's for *avoiding downtime* that usually results from 
> hardware-related data loss. If uptime is really important enough, I'd probably
> want to duplicate the entire server in a geographically diverse location, 
> making it fully redundant. So to conclude, RAID is what its acronym states: a 
> Redundant Array of *Inexpensive* Disks. In other words, a poor man's 
> redundancy.

I'll ditto all of that except for the last sentence.
RAID is for preventing downtime, not data loss.

-- 
Ben "Obi-Wan" Hollingsworth                             obiwan at jedi.com
   The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the
     Giver of all good things, so if I stand, let me stand on the
       promise that You will pull me through.  -- Rich Mullins