On Wed, Jul 28, 1999 at 11:18:00PM +1000, Simon Burge wrote:

> Has anyone had any experience with raidframe on NetBSD/pmax?

I run a simple RAID1 on my 5000/240.  It's certainly no speed daemon,
but it gets the job done.  I've even (accidentally) broken the mirror a
couple of times and it still keeps chugging along.

> A disk failure on one of the components of my 10x2GB ccd on a 1.3.3
> system is prompting me to look at alternatives :-(

:(  With that many drives, you should've seen it coming...  The more
drives you have, the more chances for failure.

> The filesystem is mostly read-only, so I was thinking of looking at a
> raid4 setup with a single hot-spare.  Sound reasonable?

I'd go RAID5 to balance out the IO.  Even if you're doing mostly read
only, having an extra spindle available for IO would probably more than
offset any extra seeking around you have to do on the RAID5 drives with
data and parity.  If you truly are doing mostly read-only, you might
even want to think about ditching the hot spare and running a dual
parity "RAID6" system.  If that "hot spare" really is hot, you minus
well put it to work instead of just hoping that it'll be reliable when
you actually need it.  Nothing sucks more than having a newly
reconstructed disk fail.

----
  Aaron J. Grier  | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofy.goof.com
    "[...] of all the port lists to grumble to about slow CPU speeds and
     other resource limitations, I'd imagine that port-vax is not a very
     good choice :-)"  --  Brian D. Chase