4 ms·
I wonder, for such mission critical data a good strategy would be to start rotating out old drives at set periods. Maybe replace one drive of your RAID5 every 6
by guy_c 11y ago
I wonder, for such mission critical data a good strategy would be to start rotating out old drives at set periods. Maybe replace one drive of your RAID5 every 6 months, not matter what the health. Once you've replaced all the drives, they will all be staggered in age by 6 months. Hopefully then the chances of multiple failures is greatly reduced.
- vidarh 11y agoReplacing a drive in a RAID5 would mean voluntarily placing yourself in a high risk position every 6 months. If you're going to do that, you better make sure you use a raid level that gives you at least two drive redundancy.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoIn the GGP post he mentions being "down to just RAID5", so presumably he was at RAID6. (Bookmarking this entire thread for much RAID wisdom.)
- ryao 11y agoFor mission critical data, you should have backups and use at least triple mirrors or raidz2. Quadruple mirrors or raidz3 are even better for the extra paranoid.
- SixSigma 11y agoThat would make your failure rate higher (from increased infant mortaility) and your maintenance more expensive (more spares, more transaction costs, more work, replacing perfectly fine working parts too soon). Drives have on-condition monitoring via SMART so you can predict age related failure. Scheduled replacement is almost the worst maintenance policy.