[vdr] Re: Disk suggestions?

[Emil Naepflein <Emil.Naepflein@philosys.de>]

On 22 Jul 2002 11:21:51 +0930, Malcolm Caldwell
<malcolm.caldwell@ntu.edu.au> wrote:

> Wrong.  It all depends on the number of disks and your raid
> configuration.  Lets say you have two disks:
> 
> With two disks, all you can sensibly do is mirroring (RAID1).  There may
> be some home users around that can afford two big disks, and value their
> recordings enough.  (I am not one of them)

So I am not wrong, because I value my recordings. ;-)

> 
> IMHO You are better using the two disks to their full capacity and
> making two /videoX volumes.

That's your personal choice. If you are limited by money and still want
software raid you can always buy 4+ smaller cheaper disks and loose only
a fraction of the capacity for redundancy. But as you have noted it
depends on the priorities. I have 7 80GB disks in Raid5 configuration
running.

> 
> If instead you make two disk look like one (RAID0 or LVM etc) you are
> twice as vulnerable to data loss from a single disk failure. 

By talking about Raid I always meant Raid5. I never spent a second
thinking about the other Raid levels.

> 
> With more disks it is less of an issue, but RAID > 0 will always mean
> less storage than if each disk was its own volume.  It is a judgment of
> $$$ vs how much you value your video data.

Yes, for me the video data is worth 1/7 of my disk capacity. This costs
me 150 EUR for a much better availability. I already had a bad disk
block once and it was a piece of cake to recover from the problem.
And mainboards with 8 IDE ports onboard are not expensive. This all runs
fine since more than a year.

Emil