Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "sinar001" 
> 
> If one of the RAID 5 disks go, I'm supposed to be able to plug in a
> new drive, and it will reconstruct everything. But just in case, I
> also have an external drive, which I can plug into any PC and read the
> stuff off it. I've also become a believer in having both MAC & PC's
> around. 
> 
> John Nollendorfs
>


Dont forget to check those drives every now and again. Raid 5 arrays
that are built with more than 3 drives will run nicely with a single
drive dead, but be gone with 2 drives dead. Running more drives can
help with this, but they can still surprise you. There is a furmula
for the number of drives used, and the number of dead drives that can
be recovered, but I don't know it off the top of my head. And some of
this depends on how the drives are striped, there are two ways (that I
know of) to make these arrays. One way is to put all the parity (error
correction) information onto a single spare drive, the other is to put
the error correction across a portion of all the drives. The second
way is the more robust method, and is what most of the newer hardware
controllers will use. Windows XP and 2003 software raid5 uses the
second method (I think).