Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[maxxsid]

I have a file server - hardware (HighPoint PCI card) RAID 5 array running in an XP pro box.
Does anyone know what happens if a PCI RAID card dies? I mean, is there any way to restore the data? I understand, if I get exactly the same card, then there shouldn't be a problem.
Does anyone have an experience with restoring the data with wares like Runtime Raid Reconstructor? How does it work? Do I plug the disks into IDE ports? What if I have more than 4 disks?

thanks!

paranoid

[Mastiff]

I don't trust any form of RAID. It has a tendency to bring file errors on to the backup in the chain, which is why I prefer to use separate backup disks instead. Not to mention that a lightning strike may kill all your disks at once, and that won't happen if the backup disks aren't connected to the pc.

[maxxsid]

Thanks!
lightning strike, huh..
i am trying to decide whether to get rid of the raid and switch to separate disks or to keep it - raid is very good as a recycle bin for old drives, you know..

i don't actually use raid for backup - i use it as an active file server and I backup its content to external usb drives.

what's your backup solution guys?

I don't trust any form of RAID. It has a tendency to bring file errors on to the backup in the chain, which is why I prefer to use separate backup disks instead. Not to mention that a lightning strike may kill all your disks at once, and that won't happen if the backup disks aren't connected to the pc.

[KingSparta]

Does anyone know what happens if a PCI RAID card dies?

You have 2 to 5 Drives full of Bad Data, Scrambled Files And Directories.

What Do I Win?

[glynor]

i don't actually use raid for backup - i use it as an active file server and I backup its content to external usb drives.

what's your backup solution guys?

Exactly what you proposed.  I use my 1 TB RAID5 volume as my primary media volume and back it up regularly to external drives (actually, I use one AMS Venus external drive case and swap in regular internal drives for my various backup volumes).  An important consideration is to always keep a backup off site.  An on-site backup won't help much if your house floods or burns down (or if your PC starts a fire in your computer room).

I've actually had my RAID card die (an older Promise one).  I pulled a ballsy maneuver and replaced it with another Promise card, but not the same model.  Hooked up the drives and all was good!  Didn't even have to rebuild the volume.  I'm not sure if it would have worked with another brand or other models of the same brand -- never looked it up.

I've been using a RAID5 volume for about 4 years now.  I've always used hardware RAID cards, which include chips that do the XOR calculations, but I've also always used relatively low-cost cards.  I've never had a problem with data corruption.  In fact, my RAID system has been more reliable than my standalone drives on the onboard IDE ports!  I'm not sure what problems Mastiff has had with RAID volumes, but I'd be willing to bet his problems were on software RAID systems (such as are included with motherboards).  Possibly even nForce4 RAID which has well documented problems!

A couple of things to consider... For SATA or PATA RAID, I'd recommend getting some of the so-called "RAID Edition" drives (such as those marketed by Western Digital).  Amusingly enough, especially since they tend to be $10 more than their non-RAID brethren, the RAID edition drives have a feature (error correction) deactivated.  This prevents problems with hardware RAID cards though, as the RAID controller should really handle any needed error correction itself.  On-drive error correction routines can "fight" with the RAID controller's routines and cause problems (usually not serious -- just requiring unnecessary rebuilds in the case of power outages and whatnot).  Along a similar line, make sure the system hosting your RAID is adequately cooled (the standard case fans aren't designed for a system with 4-5+ drives in it), and most importantly, make sure it's on an Uninterruptable Power Supply.  I use a APS brand power backup.  Sudden power outages can be much more serious for a RAID system than your average system drive!

[maxxsid]

Great info, glynor! Thanks much.
I am still debating if two 750GB seagates would be an easier and more reliable solution..

Exactly what you proposed.  I use my 1 TB RAID5 volume as my primary media volume and back it up regularly to external drives

[jgreen]

IMO, there is no debate.  If you can fit your entire library onto a 750 bg drive (I can), and then mirror it onto a second drive, you are more secure than futzing with a RAID.  The only falldown is keeping your backup drive current.  Ideally (for me) this involves at least one additional drive (or set of drives), so that backups can be leapfrogged.

I used an Adaptec 4-port RAID running RAID-0 (striped) on two ports, RAID-1 (mirrored sys drives) on the other two, on my main machine, dating from the age of Nostradamus.  As with all things techy, I feel duty-bound to ascertain and experience every screwup imaginable, at least once.  So I have personally wiped my RAID clean, twice, in the pursuit of knowledge.

The first time, I was switching out one of the mirrored sys drives and attempting to flush the card-based raid table, so that it would read the new drive as blank and restore to it.  Only I flushed the raid tables on ALL the drives, wiping all knowledge of the two striped drives.

Recovering from this was surprisingly "easy", since I had not screwed up anything else on the drives, and had (luckily) elected to use all default settings.  The wiped card was able to read the wiped (of RAID info) drive without difficulty, and i was soon up and running, almost as if I had intended to do all that in the first place.

The second time, one of the drives in the striped setup failed, and I experienced mortal pain first-hand.  RAID-0 is no backup solution, not that you intended to do that, anyway.

The interesting thing to me was examining the remaining half of the RAID-0, a single drive.  A 250 gb WD, half o a 500 gb array, the RAID info resident on the drive still presented the single 250 gb drive to the OS as a 500 gb drive.  I think there's something in that for the RAID-recovery software you mentioned looking at, although RAID info was the only coherent info I was ever able to get from the drive.  Ultimately I wiped it.

In the old days, a compelling case for RAID was the data access speed.  But with 3gbps SATA drives, faster than most old RAIDS, that argument pretty much goes away.  Maybe if you are streaming uncompressed HD you need a raid, but short of that, SATA seems perfectly fine, IMO.

[hit_ny]

In the old days, a compelling case for RAID was the data access speed.  But with 3gbps SATA drives, faster than most old RAIDS, that argument pretty much goes away. 

3Gbps !!

SATA2 does 300MB/s or 2400Gbps, i bet real world is just under 2Gbps. HDtach might confirm this. Pretty good still. I plan to jump to them from PATA when i'm ready.

The RAID card failing is an intersting scenario, you think you be safer with redundnancy but that card is the single point of failure. Talking to friends, i'm told this is prolly less likely than the HDs themselves failing, which if you lose more than one simultaneously, you will be hosed.

Personally i did not bother with RAID, just sync to a redundant set of drives monthly.

[maxxsid]

Great info, guys! Thanks.
I had my raid for about two years. Didn't have any big problems with it. For a while it was acting up and would rebuild itself several times over a month (takes about 10 hours to rebuilt) - turned out to be a faulty memory. Replaced the memory and didn't have a single problem until a couple of days ago when one of the drives died - replaced the drive and the raid rebuilt itself successfully. But it made me think about the card.. what if it dies...
I am inclined to dump the raid (sell it) and get a set of standalone (larger - 4x500GB or so) drives for the same price.
Any advise here? I heard 750GB barracudas are pretty noisy and warm..

[glynor]

SATA2 does 300MB/s or 2400Gbps, i bet real world is just under 2Gbps. HDtach might confirm this. Pretty good still. I plan to jump to them from PATA when i'm ready.

Performance between PATA and SATA 3.0Gbps (which is what they are rated -- there's really no such thing as SATA2, the "project group" is called SATA2 but manufacturers are left on their own to implement whatever set of next-gen SATA features they want) is completely and utterly nil in almost all use cases.

The performance on hard drives has not been bus limited since the says of UltraATA 100 (PATA), but limited by physical magnetic media concerns (random access read/write times, spindle speeds, platter densities, etc).  The only time you see better real-world performance on SATA drives than PATA drives is when all the data being read or written is currently in the drive's cache (often 8 or 16MB on modern drives).  The overall real-world effect of this is extremely modest (usually less than 1% in average use cases).  Plus, the 1.5Gbps or 3.0Gbps ratings manufacturers attach to these drives are theoretical burst speeds, not sustained transfer speeds.  These drives rarely, if ever, actually attain their top theoretical burst speeds in practice, besides which hard drives generally run in non-burst transfer modes which are completely different.

There's another interesting discussion of all of these points over on this thread: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=36842.msg252918#msg252918

SATA does present some real-world advantages, especially for RAID setups, but they are entirely "convenience" related.  It, of course, alleviates PATA's cable length restrictions, the connectors are simpler and less prone to breakage (bent pins or broken ribbon cables anyone?), the much smaller cables don't present as many case cooling "challenges" and allow better airflow, and they are by-default hot pluggable (and available externally).  They do not make your computer perform any better, and you will see essentially no performance difference between a UDMA 100 PATA drive, a SATA 150, or a SATA 3.0 Gbps drive.

Any advise here? I heard 750GB barracudas are pretty noisy and warm..

I have one.  They are warm.  I'd say no noisier than anything else really (but I'm not super-sensitive to that).  Unless you need them, the price per gigabyte on them is still terrible compared to the 500s.  I'd go with a set of Western Digital Raid Edition 500 GB drives if I was doing it now.

[hit_ny]

looks like that post clears up any hopes of getting a decent speed increase with SATA 2. Just an evlolutionary change and not a genrational one.

So lets say we have  4 drives of 300GB each...2 are ide and the other 2 are SATA 2. You want to image one drive to another of the same.

If i understand you correctly then ...

ide---->ide  takes little longer than
sata 3Gbs ------> sata 3Gbps

in other words the sata 2 pair will not perform the job in half the time, just that it will complete maybe a few minutes before the ide pair even though the interface speed has nearly tripled, but due to other physcial constraints (mentioned in your post) its not possible to see a lot more speed.

I guess the only performance difference that matters then is platter density. More stuff packed in, so time to read it is faster than with a smaller drive.

[glynor]

It'd be nice if newsposter would comment on the parent's question actually, since he really seems to know his disk stuff...

I'm now very curious about what would happen if my current Promise card died.  Should the RAID set be able to migrate to a different controller, or do I have to buy the same brand (and potentially a similar model of the same brand)?

I would guess that any SATA RAID controller (my disks are SATA) would handle it, but I'm not sure...

[bob]

A lot of the low end raid cards (some of the older promise ones for sure) are not true hardware raid, they don't appear to the cpu as a single drive. They do have some functions that ease the driver design of what is really a software raid setup. Most motherboard "raid" controllers are really software raid as well.

On some of my servers I've been using 3ware pata raid cards in a raid 1 configuration. The 3ware cards are true hardware raid. The drive appears (in linux) to be a single volume scsi drive. I can pull a drive while the system is running and replace it with another. The advantage of this over a backup to "separate drive" solution is 24/7 uptime when a single drive fails. In addition because of the possibility of a failed controller, I keep a spare card that is compatible with the 3 others I use in other servers (4 total controllers, one spare). Also since a lightning hit or theft could take out both drives, I do a compressed image backup to a pair of rotated firewire external drives and a backup of key data to a rewritable dvd archived to offsite storage. A little extreme perhaps but it's cost effective and I have covered all the bases as far as I can tell

I've been trying out soft raid support on a couple of new servers with 10k sata drives. So far it seems quite fast. The swap out in a failure condition is more complicated than with the hardware raid setup however.

[jgreen]

I keep a complete backup of my music (a/o 6-06) on several hard drives in my safe deposit box at my bank.  I also have a few trifling financial records there.  In the event of a nuclear holocaust or whatnot, I want ready access to two things:  my money and my music.  The rest of the material world can go to heck.

[KingSparta]

The other day i ran the vista compatibility program and my raid card is not supported. Other Than That And Two Software Programs (that i un-installed) my system is almost ready for Vista if i wanted to install it on this computer (I doubt i will however).

[glynor]

In the event of a nuclear holocaust or whatnot, I want ready access to two things:  my money and my music.

If you really investigate the science of it, in the event of a real nuclear holocaust (not a single city terrorist blast, but a real nuclear war with another nuclear power), it is extremely unlikely that anyone in the northern hemisphere would survive for more than a couple of days.  The prognosis for the rest of the world is equally bad 1-2 months out.  Certainly anything resembling organized society would have disappeared, and assuming your bank was still standing (which is absurdly unlikely) the money within would be worthless for anything other than burning it for warmth.

Of course... That's assuming you can breathe, which is again unlikely.

One of the biggest problems with thermonuclear war that isn't often considered is that one of the immediate effects of 5000 megaton expenditure is that global ocean temperatures would rise by a few degrees in the very short term.  This effect would only be temporary (the result of 1000's of "suns" being exploded on and above the surface of the planet) but would likely be sufficient to kill off the majority of the phytoplankton in the ocean.  That, plus the fact that the global firestorms that would result from the blast effects from the war would be burning the rainforests on a continental scale, would very quickly deplete our supply of oxygen.

The sudden global temperature rise would of course make the worst nightmares of global warming come true all at once (monster hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc).  After which, of course, the world would plunge into a long dark winter (from the particulate matter from the bomb effects and the burning).

The US has of course drastically reduced it's active nuclear arsenal since the "end" of the "cold war" in 1991, but if there ever was a global nuclear war, the chances that anything other than grass and some insects would survive for more than a year is still extremely small.

(I know you were kidding to some degree, but I find it interesting how people really don't understand the idea of a nuclear holocaust.)

[KingSparta]

In the event of a nuclear holocaust or whatnot, I want ready access to two things:  my money and my music.

you must look up "electromagnetic pulse (EMP)"

Most Of If Not All Electric Devices Will Stop Functioning (For Ever) If The Devices Is Within The Area.

There Are Requirements For Devices That The Military Buys That Must Be EMP Resistant.

This Adds Cost To The Device.

So The ATM Will Not Work, Your Ipod Will Be Silent, and Your Mattress Will Burn Up Along With Your House\Apartment\Condo.

[glynor]

Most Of If Not All Electric Devices Will Stop Functioning (For Ever) If The Devices Is Within The Area.

Right... and the EMP area can be enormous if the burst is high enough, enough that most Soviet war plans called for a single airburst designed to take out the entire contiguous US.

[Mr ChriZ]

In the event of a nuclear holocaust or whatnot, I want ready access to two things:  my money and my music.

Personally I'm gonna go for large quantities of Water Purification Tablets.
As many dehydrated ration packs as I can get my hands on.
Possibly a Sword.
And preferably a tank (Chemical bomb/Radiation proof etc).
Not so sure what I'm gonna do after that. 

[KingSparta]

Personally I'm gonna go for large quantities of Water Purification Tablets.

Well, you can just boil it, Also Add a drop of clorox, but the bigger problem is "The fallout" and since everything within the area will be contaminated and the downwind fallout area you will still die.

At one point in my military career, I had to calculate Nuclear blast and fallout data. Even if the warhead is a small combat tactical nuke, life will be bleak.

No Quickie Marts Or Wal-Mart's for a few years, and in the USA we can't have that.

[hit_ny]

interesting to see the subliminal connection between

- loss of one's RAID card and therefore music with the end of the world.

 

PS
How did each side verify that the other did indeed "drastically reduce it's active nuclear arsenal" ?

[KingSparta]

Both of them are also interconnected with cussing.

[KingSparta]

PS
How did each side verify that the other did indeed "drastically reduce it's active nuclear arsenal" ?

Trust But Verify

In the Case of the Pershing Missile (They Can\Could Carry A Nuclear War Head) I Was At Fort Sill Oklahoma When The Soviet Union Came To Fort Sill Oklahoma, And The Missiles Were Dismantled In Front Of Them.

They Were Rather Old Anyway.

[hit_ny]

Yeah, but does each side *really* know how many the other even had in the first place ?

Watching a few get dismantled seems insidious at best.

Isn't there more to this ?

It's quite a reach going from arch-rival to partner (as opposed to ally).

[glynor]

Yeah, but does each side *really* know how many the other even had in the first place ?

Not necessarily, but they are actually quite hard to hide (at least ICBMs), probably more than you'd expect.  And generally, they had agents here to verify the destruction of all of them (not just a sample), and same goes for our agents there.  Granted, it's a lot more difficult to verify the really dangerous ones (the submarine based ICBMs and nuke-tipped cruise missiles) but...

It's fairly easy to discern manufacturing capability.  Even if you figure that you can hide the missiles themselves, in an age of satellite reconnaissance you can't very easily hide the huge manufacturing complexes (and assorted city-sized staffing requirements) that are required to mass-produce these things.  Plus, in order to mass produce nukes you need to have a number of large reactors specially designed to produce fissionable material appropriate to their manufacturing.  Once you know where the manufacturing plants are, how big they are, and what the size and capacity of the nuclear plants that produce the fissionable material is, and what the staffing levels of the plants are it's a fairly simple mathematical procedure to figure out ranges of "worst case" and "best case" for the tonnage of weapons each side has.  The governments have plenty of "bean counters" who can figure this stuff out.

Most importantly though, it's in both our and their best interest to decommission these things, so there's no reason to hide some.  We both still have way more weapons than we could ever actually use even in a full scale conflict, and these things are not cheap to maintain!  In fact, we were (somewhat) shocked to learn when we did go to the USSR to watch some of these decomissionings that a large percentage of the Soviet arsenal probably wouldn't have ever "worked" anyway due to neglect and lack of upkeep (and poor training and procedures).  It saves us (and them) real money to deactivate these "old" missiles, and since we have way more than we'll ever need...  What would the motivation be to lie?

[glynor]

interesting to see the subliminal connection between

- loss of one's RAID card and therefore music with the end of the world.

Well, to me it's less the music than the pr0n.    

[KingSparta]

I don't know whether you truly did this.

Yes, Not that i Enjoyed it, with all the slide rules, thick books, (Red Team And Blue Teams), Double Locks, Blaaa, Blaaa, Blaaa

But that was Prior To 1986, So no Idea where the program is at this point if at all.

I Was Part Of The Field Artillery Small Tactical Nuke (Nuclear Surety Program) That You Should Remember. I have no Idea if they still do it since they pulled the Small Nukes out Of Germany And Korea (Sort Of, But They Are Not Too Far Away).

I Also Had A TS-BI, I Really Enjoyed The FBI Talking To Every Kid I Played Marbles With Since I Took Off My Diapers.

[glynor]

I Was Part Of The Field Artillery Small Tactical Nuke

Ahhh.... The weapons that couldn't ever be used.   

All nuclear weapons are strategic.  They are primarily political, not military, weapons because no field commander would ever be given carte blanch permission to use them in a real war (unless a strategic strike had already happened).

[KingSparta]

Never Heard of it.

I Was A Forward Observer, And Then Went To Flight School And Became A Areal Observer For The Army In A OH-58 A\C And OH-58D

Spent Most Of My Time In The 82nd, Went To Grenada in 1983 And Iraq With Them in 1990-1991 I think it was.

It Was Fun.

They are primarily political, not military, weapons because no field commander would ever be given carte blanch permission to use them in a real war (unless a strategic strike had already happened).

Yes, Everything Was Top Down Approved For A Set Time. Not Sure I Would Want Some Of Them (Higher Ups) With The Codes. And We Would Need To Be In A Real Pinch To Have Ever Used Them. More Likely Scenario Would Be, We Being Over Run, We Would Need To Destroy Them, And Then We Would Die. Thats The Way I Pictured It.


[Insert Anything Music Or Raid Related Here]

[glynor]

Not Sure I Would Want Some Of Them (Higher Ups) With The Codes.

Ain't that the truth!

The only way I'd want anyone to have the proverbial "button" would be if the button were also wired to explosive vests strapped onto that person's loved ones.  Even then I don't know... 

[bob]

To see how close we once came to a serious nuke exchange you might want to read this reprint of a Washington Post article...

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/stories.htm

[KingSparta]

That 13 Day Stand-Off Was Actually All Over A Cigar And A Cup Of Coffee.

In The Soviet Union Comrade Arkhipov Has Been Credited As Being The True Creator Of Starbucks.

[bob]

Hope he wasn't putting Polonium-210 into the coffee (or the cigars).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6199464.stm

[hit_ny]

Ha!...lots of theories about that.

RAID chat will continue after the....intermission

[maxxsid]

Just an update..
I dumped the raid and got a NAS enclosure (D-Link DNS-323) with 2x500GB SATA drives.
Works great (except for one little problem) - small footprint, reasonably fast, quiet and energy efficient.
The problem - the enclosure runs under linux and it messes up SOME of the windows filenames (with unicode characters) - I'll put this problem into a separate topic.

mx

Great info, guys! Thanks.
I had my raid for about two years. Didn't have any big problems with it. For a while it was acting up and would rebuild itself several times over a month (takes about 10 hours to rebuilt) - turned out to be a faulty memory. Replaced the memory and didn't have a single problem until a couple of days ago when one of the drives died - replaced the drive and the raid rebuilt itself successfully. But it made me think about the card.. what if it dies...
I am inclined to dump the raid (sell it) and get a set of standalone (larger - 4x500GB or so) drives for the same price.
Any advise here? I heard 750GB barracudas are pretty noisy and warm..

[benn600]

Well, does anyone remember the Windows solution.  You can always use software raid under Windows and if you're only using Raid0 or Raid1, it isn't much of an issue.  For Raid5, you have to replace some Windows system files with hacked files on the net.  This is a great solution because any Windows computer in the world could access your data.