Sorry about your broken RAID 5

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Still trying to understand your argument

Granting that a URE rate of 10^-15 [1] means that the incidence of two UREs per array approaches unity once the storage system exceeds 10^30 sectors (10^39 bytes, which is a rather large array), what isn't clear is why this is a problem.

A RAID5 system doesn't fail when there are two UREs unless they both occur in the same data set (effectively the same sector on two drives.) I'm probably misunderstanding your argument, since you seem to be assuming that two bad sectors anywhere in the array will take the whole array down without possibility of recovery.

Now, drive failures are something else again. Lose two drives per array and you are in deep, deep weeds. That happens a lot more than most think; it happened to me Sunday morning when two drives quit within a couple of hours. Not amusing. Fortunately the backups and panic snapshot from the surviving array (minus redundancy) were sufficient to prevent data loss.

Anyway, I'm afraid you're not getting your thoughts across very clearly.

[1] Not 10^15, as you wrote -- you might want to fix the typo.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 07/24/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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