Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
You are SO right, Peter. I have the active monitoring, of course, and I've rebuilt a few RAIDS in my time. But...it makes me feel a bit more proactive about backups (as if I needed to be, but obsessive is obsessive), and it's a bit like having a nice wubby. :-)
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RAID has uses and limitations. I had a RAID setup on a previous version of my desktop: the motherboard I used would implement RAID if you had multiple drives. I had a pair of SATA drives, and chose to stripe them, so they were seen as one big drive by the system, rather than mirror them as normally done. It spread disk reads/writes over two drives, and sped things up nicely. If I'd had four drives, I could have done stripe+ mirror, but I didn't.
At employer -1 we had a RAID failure on
both sides of the array. The machine involved was an old Sun system originally acquired by a company my employer acquired, and used to host an Oracle database they used. It was old enough that the failing drives were 2GB units. Fortunately, Sun still had some and field service could repair the hardware, but it cost about $10K and the services of a high level Oracle consultant to restore the data.
The machine was part of my world as the main *nix admin, but I made blindingly clear to the user department that I knew just enough about Oracle to be dangerous, and was
not an Oracle DBA. I was responsible for the machine it ran on, but dealing with it was their problem. Of course, the Oracle DBA they once had was long gone, and the guy who originally set it up for them was too. It was a disaster just waiting to happen, and it did. When I was asked what the problem was I said "Old hardware that should have been replaced years previously".
There was nothing about what the user department was doing that required Oracle. I was pushing to get the database migrated to SQL Server, where we actually had DBAs and developers in house who could work on it. (That would also migrate it to the Windows Server side and get it out of my world, which would be a plus from my side.) I believe that was the game plan, but was laid off before they got there.
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Dennis