On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 04:23:45PM -0700, Caffeinate The World wrote:
> If you have experience in using RAIDFrame in production, I'd like to
> know what your thoughts are. 
> 
> I hear it is CPU intensive, how intensive is it?

my 133Mhz pentium seems to be plenty.

> What do you use for hot swappables with NetBSD? Any power down
> necessary?

I don't do hot swap...

> Which RAID do you use and for what application?

I used RAID1 on a production machine handling our source code repository
for a couple years until a power hit blew out one of the drives in the
mirror.  I didn't notice that the mirror was broken until a few days
after the power hit, since the machine continued running.  :)  when I
did get around to opening the machine, I found that the failed drive had
done so catastrophically: there were singed chips and burned runs.

I recently brought a machine out of storage.  one of the drives in its
RAID1 had failed due to a physical head crash (I'm guessing due to
excessive bumping around when moving into my new house) but I was still
able to recover all my data off the remaining drive with little hassle.

> Anyone using it on a database system like PostgreSQL or MySQL? Which
> RAID? What was it's performance with RAID added?

I have yet to get RAIDFrame RAID1 or RAID5 behaving faster than a single
disk on my meager hardware, but the redundancy has saved my ass twice
now from catastrophic disk failure and I am completely willing to
sacrifice a little performance for safety.

I believe in RAIDFrame.  :)

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofygoof.com
      "It's not fast, but why not?"  --  John Klos on VAX dnet client
  "because it needlessly contributes to global warming?"  --  Paul Vixie