Recording audio with LC

[Bob Sneidar]

Well there are raids and there are raids. One of the departments I did not control at the time bought a couple of Dell raids. Yeah, I said Dell. After one failed 3 separate times with multiple hard drives each time, effectively killing the luns, and after the one they used to host about 20 web sites failed and come to find out they did not backup for 4 months, some sites never, we stopped using them. We also stopped paying the salaries of the guys who bought them. :-)

On the other hand, I have 4 Apple Xserve RAID's and they have been rock solid. I have lost 3 or 4 drives in the past, but never 2 at once (even though in a 7 drive LUN you could lose 2 drives simultaneously and recover). I pop another drive module in and it rebuilds in a few hours, without any down time. 

You know, the "I" in "RAID" stands for "Inexpensive". Don't believe it. RAID's are particularly sensitive to response times of the drives they use. If one drive has a significantly slower response time you can get out of sync conditions which play havoc with RAID's. 

Most good vendors put industrial quality drives in, which are the drives that are tested at the factory and are the cream of the crop. 

Bob


On Feb 24, 2011, at 2:25 PM, stephen barncard wrote:

> I decided that RAID arrays aren't really useful as a "backup" after my last
> disaster (Raid rebuilds on a 500 gig drive takes longer than 8 hours), I
> hate the fact that files are accessible from a single drive after a crash of
> one, and have gone to a mirror strategy with regular backups done several
> times a day.
> 
> The archive master is fed from a collection drive first to save wear and
> tear on the archive master. So at times there are three copies of the latest
> transfers existing. Then I use FolderSynchroniser or Carbon Copy Cloner to
> maintain sync between versions. This is multi-gig sized video and audio
> files.
> 
> RAID is great for faster access time, but for archive, it scares me.
> Definitely good to separate the working from the archive.