Quick question..
I'm putting together a low-powered atom based "server" that will be in a hosted location not easily accessible. It won't be anything critical, but I'm going to have two 500GB SATA drives which I'd like to mirror. I have a great deal of experience with various hardware RAID controllers (Dell PERC, HP SmartArray, etc.) and with those, if a drive in a RAID 1 fails it's completely transparent to the OS. You can keep working while the drive is failed and you swap in a replacement.
Is this the same with Linux? If I have two drives (or I guess in Linux their partitions) mirrored and say the "primary" disk fails does it seamlessly fail over to the mirror? I think it should because it appears the disks are abstracted to the OS through the RAID device /dev/md0 (or whatever it may be).
Also, how does this work for booting? I see that I need to setup GRUB to boot the RAID volumes, but what if say a disk starts throwing errors and doesn't die completely? A hardware based controller will knock that disk offline and prevent it from being used. I could see GRUB trying to boot off that disk if it were the primary. If that happens, the machine would fail to boot..
Thoughts?
Thanks!!
Riley
I'm putting together a low-powered atom based "server" that will be in a hosted location not easily accessible. It won't be anything critical, but I'm going to have two 500GB SATA drives which I'd like to mirror. I have a great deal of experience with various hardware RAID controllers (Dell PERC, HP SmartArray, etc.) and with those, if a drive in a RAID 1 fails it's completely transparent to the OS. You can keep working while the drive is failed and you swap in a replacement.
Is this the same with Linux? If I have two drives (or I guess in Linux their partitions) mirrored and say the "primary" disk fails does it seamlessly fail over to the mirror? I think it should because it appears the disks are abstracted to the OS through the RAID device /dev/md0 (or whatever it may be).
Also, how does this work for booting? I see that I need to setup GRUB to boot the RAID volumes, but what if say a disk starts throwing errors and doesn't die completely? A hardware based controller will knock that disk offline and prevent it from being used. I could see GRUB trying to boot off that disk if it were the primary. If that happens, the machine would fail to boot..
Thoughts?
Thanks!!
Riley