Subj : To RAID or not to RAID?
To   : astark
From : Angus Mcleod
Date : Wed Aug 18 2004 11:01 am

  Re: To RAID or not to RAID?
  By: astark to Angus Mcleod on Wed Aug 18 2004 19:18:00

 > Im interested in how your going to do this as well as upon my return to the
 > states I am moving my mp3 drive to a dedicated machine and want to put as 
 > least ammount of wear and tear on it as possible =)

As of now, no decisions made.

I want some redundancy, because I'm not prepared to lose 60-80 gig of music due
to some disk drive going bad.  So originally I thought of using a RAID
configuration.  I was thinking RAID-1 (mirroring) of two x 80 Gig IDE drives. 
I would use Linux with the software RAID feature which I have used previously
(commercial environment) and had success with.

Then it occurred to me that if I only periodically add data to the array, I
could use a single disk with a backup as opposed to RAID.  Then one disk could
be spun down or placed in "sleeping" power mode status for most of the day
(using 'hdparm') to minimize wear'n'tear and power consumption.  In fact BOTH
disks could be spun down when the unit was not in use, but when a request for
data came through, *one* disk could be spun up, and *which* disk that was could
be selected randomly so as to spread the wear across the two disks.

As of yet, I have not decided whether I will use this method, or RAID.  If I
were contemplating a RAID-5 setup (which I'd actually prefer) then there would 
be no question as to whether a backup-disk scenario was an alternative.  

The machine in question will serve the data via NFS and (probably) via HTTP as
well, so any system on the LAN can access it.  'ogg321' can play a URL served
by Apache, 

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