RAID/SSD's

[blue moon]

I forgot to mention that's how we have our machines setup already. I would actually rather
raid the OS drive because that would be the majority of our time recovering from a failure,
reinstalling all of our programs etc. Storage is just that, a fairly long copy time and we'd
be done.

EB,

You could just image the OS drive once you get it setup like you want.  You could even take a spare drive, clone it and then just let it sit for that day the OS shits the bed.  You could run the cloning process from time to time to keep it updated.

To do raid 1 properly I think you need hardware and as Pierre said, it's picky.

I have a client that uses Raid 1 for his boot drives... the whole server MUST be running... it's running a raid 1 card and he has a second one sitting on a shelf in case that card shits the bed.  He can't afford to be down and he has to pay for it.

It would be cheaper to do what I'm suggesting, but he has lost 2-3 hard drives since I built the system and he's never known.  The card just emails me, I get a new drive and go install it.  He's only down for a few minutes during lunch.

My production manager's PC flipped out on us the other day (hard drive controller driver issue)... he just moved over to another PC to get his work done while I sorted it all out.

Yup, keep it simple! As Kevin said, you have to have the replacement controller, but in reality, you need a hot swap server that is identical to the one you have. We had power supplies go out making the RAID crash and lose data (bad battery on the controller, never knew about it as the server was not configured to send notifications and we were not checking since everything was working fine!). We've had replacement controllers on the shelf and when we tried to put it in, the firmware version was different and it would not recognize the drives. Also, all the OS data on the drive is set up for that server's hardware so it's not like you can just plug it into another system. Some installations will recover, but some will hang. Unless you are mission critical, it's not really worth the time and money needed to make it work. . .

pierre

[Gilligan]

... never knew about it as the server was not configured to send notifications and we were not checking since everything was working fine!). ...
pierre

Ughhh... I've done that with my personal server... more than once.

One time, I was able to swap boards on the hard drive and got UBER lucky in that it actually was compatible AND the one that I got working was also the one that was last to fail.

I spoke with a data recovery specialist in town and he said to buy a lottery ticket as that shouldn't have worked so well.

[Admiral]

Seems you are referring to having vital data on these computers? If so then yes it should be mirrored and backed up remotely ideally.  I would look into software for raiding which is more versatile and compatible with different drives / sizes etc.

The artwork computers here have a SSD drive for the programs, regular platter spin hard drive for the backup / scratch disks.  Nothing on these is vital, just would make it easy to restore the computer if the SSD failed. 

Server with hard disk redundancy is where all files are (art and everything else for the company), and this is backed up to another server remotely every night. 

[Gilligan]

Admiral, you can't do raid on OS drives with software alone.  It has to happen at the hardware level to be able to boot.

[Admiral]

Admiral, you can't do raid on OS drives with software alone.  It has to happen at the hardware level to be able to boot.

I never said on the OS drives...and personally I wouldn't store anything vital on OS drives (unless you are backing that up easily and efficiently), those are the drives most likely to fail with all of the reads and writes constantly.

A central server with a raid setup (why not just a NAS? I use Synology) that backups daily is easy to install and very reliable, much more so than computers for all of the data.

[Gilligan]

Admiral, I see my disconnect... I just followed your posting as if it was a continuation on a conversation that you weren't even a part of.

My bad!