Comment Lies! (Score 1) 803
The article says "RAID 5 Stops working" blah blah blah. That's not the case. The purpose of RAID 5, as has been mentioned several times in the comments, is to give you MORE time to recover from a failed drive.
No matter what size your array is, having more time to recover from any failure is invaluable. Therefore claiming that because bigger drives are available, does NOT invalidate the value that RAID5 has to an organisation.
Having said that, RAID5 is NEVER considered the ultimate means of protecting your data. If you think it is, then think again. You must always have multiple copies of your data, in multiple locations, and preferably on a magnetic media for long term storage if necessary.
I have a collection of servers, all with various amounts and types of data. These servers have RAID arrays, some mirrored drives only, others with Mirrors and RAID5 for more important data.
Each are incrementally backed up hourly to a "backup server" on to another RAID5 array.
A daily backup is also taken, on to another path.
Each night, this backup server's data is written to an LTO4 tape, and the next morning it is taken off-site.
We also keep monthly tapes on-site, and off-site.
At any one point, I can recover data to any server from up to an hour ago, as of last night from either yesterday's daily HDD backup, or last night's tape. Or at the end of every month for as long as we've had this backup strategy.
This is the best backup strategy I could come up with the budget I had, and I don't pretend that it's the best in the world.
But simply relying on RAID 5 and nothing else, you're asking for serious trouble.
No matter what size your array is, having more time to recover from any failure is invaluable. Therefore claiming that because bigger drives are available, does NOT invalidate the value that RAID5 has to an organisation.
Having said that, RAID5 is NEVER considered the ultimate means of protecting your data. If you think it is, then think again. You must always have multiple copies of your data, in multiple locations, and preferably on a magnetic media for long term storage if necessary.
I have a collection of servers, all with various amounts and types of data. These servers have RAID arrays, some mirrored drives only, others with Mirrors and RAID5 for more important data.
Each are incrementally backed up hourly to a "backup server" on to another RAID5 array.
A daily backup is also taken, on to another path.
Each night, this backup server's data is written to an LTO4 tape, and the next morning it is taken off-site.
We also keep monthly tapes on-site, and off-site.
At any one point, I can recover data to any server from up to an hour ago, as of last night from either yesterday's daily HDD backup, or last night's tape. Or at the end of every month for as long as we've had this backup strategy.
This is the best backup strategy I could come up with the budget I had, and I don't pretend that it's the best in the world.
But simply relying on RAID 5 and nothing else, you're asking for serious trouble.
