On 08/12/17 15:02, Federico Giannici wrote: > On 08/12/17 20:48, noah pugsley wrote: >> On Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 10:55 AM, Federico Giannici >> <giann...@neomedia.it> wrote: >>> Is it possible to set a "Hot Spare" chunk for a RAID1 Softraid? >>> From the "bioctl" man page seems that this functionality is available for >>> "RAID controllers" only. >>> Is it correct? >>> >>> Thanks.
you can just leave a drive on-line and waiting to be added to an array. When you have a failure, you COULD have it happen on its own with appropriate monitoring and scripting, or you could wait until an optimal time to rebuild. Rebuilding is a performance impacting task, you might want some say about when it happens. >> I don't know about that, but from softraid(4) I know that: >> >> "RAID 1 >> A mirroring discipline. It copies data across more than one chunk to >> provide for data loss. Read performance is increased, though at the >> cost of write speed. Unlike traditional RAID 1, softraid supports the >> use of more than two chunks in a RAID 1 setup." >> >> So, why not a 3 disk mirror? > > Good point, but now I have two more questions: > > 1) What about the "cost of write speed"? Will writing times increase > further with another disk? Is it negligible? depends on your needs (and hw). Test, don't speculate. Yes, writes will be slower. Reads MAY be faster. But the performance loss may be trivial compared to the difficulty when you have a multiple disk failure. I've often wished hw raid controllers accepted three disk RAID1 configs. > 2) What happens when one of the three disk goes bad? Is it signaled in > any way? The softraid goes "degraded" or remains "Online" (I suppose the > latter)? Don't ask these questions of others, their answers may or may not apply to you, and YOU need to find them out yourself the easy way...before you find out the hard way. Practice RAID response and recovery. Nick.