Re: FYI: RAID5 unusably unstable through 2.6.14
From: Phillip Susi
Date: Tue Jan 17 2006 - 21:09:29 EST
Michael Loftis wrote:
What about I said was inaccurate? I never said that it increases
exponentially or anything like that, just that it does increase, which
you've proven. I was speaking in the case of a RAID-5 set, where the
minimum is 3 drives, so every additional drive increases the chance of
a double fault condition. Now if we're including mirrors and
stripes/etc, then that means we do have to look at the 2 spindle case,
but the third spindle and beyond keeps increasing. If you've a 1%
failure rate, and you have 100+ drives, chances are pretty good you're
going to see a failure. Yes it's a LOT more complicated than that.
I understood you to be saying that a raid-5 was less reliable than a
single disk, which it is not. Maybe I did not read correctly. Yes, a 3
+ n disk raid-5 has a higher chance of failure than a 3 disk raid-5, but
only slightly so, and in any case, a 3 disk raid-5 is FAR more reliable
than a single drive, and only slightly less reliable than a two disk
raid-1 ( though you get 3x the space for only 50% higher cost, so 6x
cheaper cost per byte of storage ).
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