[mythtv-users] Recording directly to RAID

[Joseph Fry]

> > While RAID5 is fast enough for many uses, what I particularly dislike
> > in it is the horribly slow rebuild time and loss of performance during
> it.
> > I have seen RAID5 arrays dies because another disk died during rebuild.
>
> One more point here: in particular with big, multi-TB disks RAID5 is
> of dubious value. The heavy disk activity dyring the long rebuild is
> often the trigger that kills the second disk.
> In MythTV context, independent disks might actually give better
> reliability: if you have RAID5 die because of two disks failing you
> lose everything in the array, with independent disks you lose only
> what's on those disks.


My apologies for starting yet another pro/con RAID discussion.

I will readily admit that I was quite fond of my RAID solution when I had
it... thought I was being smart using it, and even advocated it to others.
 Now that I have "seen the light" I realize that for various reasons I was
getting no real advantage running RAID, and several potential disadvantages.

I do still mirror my root partition, simply so I don't need to rebuild my
server if a drive fails.  I'll still need to restore any lost data, but at
least I don't need to rebuild and configure the server.

Ultimately, when the choice is between dedicating a drive for parity on an
array, or using that same drive to backup important media (rips of dvd's
that have been scratched, wedding videos, news stories about my kids,
etc.)... choose the backup.

If you really want to do RAID, go for it, MythTV works quite well on an
array.  However I felt that it made things like adding/replacing drives,
recovering from a power failure, etc. far more frustrating.
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