My 240GB Maxtor drive on my primary workstation bit the big one last
thursday. It seems like the second half of the drive is gone and the
first half is unaffected. Part of /home is still useable, but all of
/usr/local is gone. Since this is the 3rd time I've lost vast amounts
of data due to a disk failure in as many years, I decided to set up a
RAID 1 array with 2 massive drives. Oddly enough, my wife felt that $500
for a crash-proof RAID array was reasonable (I may have lost a few hundred
pictures from our last few vacations) so I picked up a RocketRaid 1640 card
and two 300GB SATA drives.
The RocketRaid isn't a perfect solution, but it seems to be working reasonably
well. My biggest complaint is that the drivers and RAID management software
are proprietary. Aside from that, I'll have to make a new initrd with the
hpt374 module every time the kernel gets updated. Installation was reasonably
straight forward though. Hook up both drives, install Debian onto the first
drive, create the new initrd with the hpt374 module, sd_mod, and scsi_mod,
edit /etc/fstab to look for the partitions on /dev/sda instead of /dev/hde,
reboot and have the card mirror the first drive over the second drive,
install the management software, done.
Without a doubt there are better choices for a SATA RAID card. I didn't want
to go too crazy on price though.
posted at: 13:24 | path: | permanent link to this entry
