Harry gets sad.
One of the drives in my RAID5 array seems to have comitted hara kiri. Just as I was making my morning tea, its death screams beeped forth from the hall — not very honorable — and on reboot, the RAID BIOS screen throws up a horrid red “Broken array” message.
Since the whole server is a bit shagged anyway, I think I’m going to decomission it and move to mirrored 1.5Tb drives. This will give a bit of extra capacity as well as using less power than my current 4-drives-plus-raid-card configuration. I can bump Ubuntu up from 7.10 to the 9.04 beta as well.
So — with drives ordered and an external USB caddy on the way for backing everything up — I shall find out about setting up drive mirroring in software under Ubuntu. Wish me luck!
Why not simply use raid 1?
For the mirroring? I did.
When I went with RAID 5 I did it because of the cost implications — you get a bit more bang for your buck than with RAID1.
Unfortunately the server is back to being a heap in the corner because I chose reiserfs for the system drive and then had a power cut. Argh!