Les Mikesell wrote:
Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> Do you know if a firewire drive will work reliably as a raid1 mirror
>> with a matching internal drive?
>
> Not a clue, never tried.
>
>> With the older stack it isn't
>> recognized in time at boot-up to automatically connect the md device.
>
> It is if you load the firewire modules in your initrd. :)
Hmmm, would that happen by itself if the drive is attached during an
install with the new system?
I'm reasonably certain that's the case.
>> You can add it and the re-sync generally works if the
partition is not
>> too busy, but it tends to be failed out of the array if it is left
>> connected when the partition is very active.
>
> I wonder if the cfs scheduler would help with this any. And/or shutting
> off beagle (which likes to absolutely slaughter the i/o on my
> workstation).
The place I want it is as a 3rd member of a RAID1 set that is used for
the pooled file storage for backuppc - which hardlinks all identical
files it finds across your backup set. This is extremely busy during
backups and takes an impractically long time to copy with tar or other
file-oriented means because of the way hardlinks are re-constructed
(many days for a 250 gig drive), while a raid-sync will complete in a
couple of hours. There's probably a better way to do that now with LVM
snapshots but that's getting off the topic of reliability.
Wait... So you're essentially creating a cloned volume on the firewire
disk via a raid resync, rather than having the initial backup written
with the firewire disk connected in the raid set? If so, that's
moderately amusing... :)
--
Jarod Wilson
jwilson(a)redhat.com