Re: [cobalt-users] Re: Need to buy a new Raq

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 7/19/00 12:14 AM, Johan-Kristian Wold at jkwold@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> In cobalt-users digest, Vol 1 #1101, Tim wrote (shuffling the quoting
> a bit here to repair the broken context):
>>> I want the the raq  to have
>>> an additional hard drive so that I can backup to it in case of the primary
>>> hard drive failing. Is this possible with a raq 3/3i? Should I go for the
>>> raq 4 that supports raid 1 preinstalled?
>> 
>> Raid would be the best. You can lease this unit for under $160 a month.
> 
> Raid is not an adequate substitute for a good backup. While a raid
> will protect (to a certain degree) against a broken drive, it doesn't
> protect against the failures between the keyboard and the chair
> (user/administrator errors), which are far more common than a drive
> failure.

This is very true.  RAID is designed to save you in the case of a single
disk failure.  However, I am not sure if the software RAID employed on the
Raq4 will accomplish this or not.  Sure your *data* will still be there but
the box will be down, right?


> As a side note, since Cobalt uses standard IDE drives, the
> reliability on these drives is not too good - Mirroring the drives in
> them is a good idea...

And this is not hardware RAID, nor is it hot-swappable.  I am firmly of the
opinion that if you have a single production server (that is not a load
balanced cluster) you need to have hot swap hardware RAID on the server.

-k