GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - View Single Post - Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009

rowan · 10-24-2008, 11:56 AM

The article headline is 100% sensationalist and makes it sound like there's a fundamental bug with the RAID5 algorithm that will cause it to fail in 2009. LOL

Another thing the author skipped over (which Phil21 points out) is the importance of backups. I had a lot of problems with RAID5 on my Windows PC (which I later determined were probably due to dodgy SATA cables) and had to rebuild several times. So what's the first thing you do when your controller says the array is degraded? You don't rebuild, you BACK UP first. I always had at least one full backup so an immediate incremental backup of the degraded array only took about 10-20 mins. At that point my data was a lot safer, and I could then think about rebuilding the array

I do agree that increasing capacities will present some serious maintenance problems in the coming years. Maximum drive capacities have increased by a factor of more than 10 times in the past 5 years but the raw read and write speeds haven't kept up with that improvement... this means longer and longer to copy or rebuild your data safely.

10-24-2008, 11:56 AM
rowan Too lazy to set a custom title Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 17,393	The article headline is 100% sensationalist and makes it sound like there's a fundamental bug with the RAID5 algorithm that will cause it to fail in 2009. LOL Another thing the author skipped over (which Phil21 points out) is the importance of backups. I had a lot of problems with RAID5 on my Windows PC (which I later determined were probably due to dodgy SATA cables) and had to rebuild several times. So what's the first thing you do when your controller says the array is degraded? You don't rebuild, you BACK UP first. I always had at least one full backup so an immediate incremental backup of the degraded array only took about 10-20 mins. At that point my data was a lot safer, and I could then think about rebuilding the array I do agree that increasing capacities will present some serious maintenance problems in the coming years. Maximum drive capacities have increased by a factor of more than 10 times in the past 5 years but the raw read and write speeds haven't kept up with that improvement... this means longer and longer to copy or rebuild your data safely.