[NBLUG/talk] RAID?

[Scrappy Laptop]

Lincoln Peters <anfrind at gmail.com> wrote: On Dec 31, 2007 10:57 AM, Scrappy Laptop  wrote:
> This may be simplistic, but just make the partitions on each physical disk
> the same size?  It'll leave extra space on some of the drives, but you can
> lump those into another RAID volume if you so desire and don't mind the
> performance hit of two volumes' stripes on the same physical drive(s).

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're suggesting, that would mean
two or more RAID partitions for the same array on a single drive.
Which means that if one drive fails, you could lose more than one
part, and RAID-5 is NOT guaranteed to recover fully when more than one
part of the array fails.

>
> Hey!  What if you created another abstraction layer that would join the two
> RAIDs into a single volume?  Totally Rube-Goldberg-esque, but an interesting
> way to use all available disk space...

I've thought about writing a program that would present itself as a
file server (maybe Samba, most likely WebDAV for the first version),
and manage a set of files distributed over multiple hard disks.  Kind
of like RAID-5, but running at a filesystem level rather than a block
level.  It would give me the flexibility I have in mind, but I'm not
sure whether or not it's already been done (although I know Google has
something similar).


-- 
Lincoln Peters


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Nope; I was actually talking about two separate arrays (and therefore volumes) that happen to be on the same set of physical disks.  Lose a drive and two arrays would need to be rebuilt.  I would not really advise it since the scattered I/O would kill your response times; it just led to the further extrapolation of the extra abstraction layer that would ultimately present a single volume that actually consisted of two separate RAID arrays on the same set of drives for the sole purpose of using every last available block of storage.  Just a silly mind game, that's all.

       
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