Re: [tlug] Setting up a RAID 1 with Ubuntu (Was: Hard Drive Failure)

[Dave M G <dave@example.com>]

Edward,

> You don't *need* identical drives, the point was that it doesn't make
> much sense deliberately buying drives from different manufacturers.
Okay... but can I have slightly different drives? Like, assuming both
are SATA, 7200 rpm, and 3Gb transfer speed, but one is 450 MB, and the
other is 500 MB, can I still set them up as a RAID? From what others
have said, the answer is yes, though of course the size of the RAID
would be constrained to the smaller of the two drives.

>
> You are talking about the merits of backup versus raid.  This is pretty
> analogous to ABS breaks(raid) and airbags(backup).  ABS might stop you
> having an accident, airbags will lessen the impact. 

That analogy confuses me. How does having a RAID stop me from having
drives fail? I thought the whole point was that if one of the two RAID
drives failed, then I could just replace it, and the still-working RAID
drive would copy all the data over to it. So isn't that another form of
back up, not prevention?

Just as a side note, I'm still intending, as I always have done, to back
up my most absolute precious data off-site, in the event of something
catastrophic happening like North Korea hitting my apartment with a
missile. The RAID would be just so I could hopefully not have to do the
whole annoying re-installation and reconfiguration of everything in the
event of a hard drive failure.

-- 
Dave M G