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autrijus (1505)

autrijus
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http://pugs.blogs.com/

Journal of autrijus (1505)

Friday September 02, 2005
02:43 PM

Day 208: OT - Disk gone again...

[ #26576 ]
Turns out that the new hard disk only lasted for 18 days -- it suddenly broke without any warnings. To make things even more catastrophic, my /home backup dump is corrupted as well.

So instead of hacking on Pugs, I've been stuck for a whole day salvaging bits, buying another replacement disk, et cetera.

This has totally convinced me of the need of a software RAID for my laptop, so that's what I'm setting up now. Since the laptop can only carry two internal disks, RAID1 looks simplest to set up with FreeBSD's GEOM/gmirror, but I'm still looking for other solutions...


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Day 208: OT - Disk gone again... 5 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • If it were me, I wouldn't use GEOM. I setup a new web server last week using dual drives and a bootable GEOM mirror using these instructions:

    http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/ [freebsd.org]

    After about 4 reboots and 30 minutes later, they crapped all over themselves and I had to start over. I settled for a nightly dump to disk two and weekly CD backups of that.
    • Hmm.... I have been using gmirror for a quite while and I like it. I have experienced disk crashes several times already but for all cases the recoveries went well. That even includes that case where BOTH disks got corrupted -- in which case I set up yet another gmirror disk consisting of only one disk, copied everything that can be copied, booted from the new gmirror disk, and finally added a disk to the mirror. If I were to choose software RAID on FreeBSD, I'll use gmirror. I used to use vinum but g
  • I'm a sysadmin by trade (well, one of too many trades these days :) so I know how it feels like when your disk is dead.

    However I am not sure if RAID on laptops is a good idea in terms of power consumption. What I do is protect the server with RAID and backup your laptop there. Simple rsync would suffice for most cases.

    And if possible make your laptop as "thin" as possible -- for instance, I use IMAP for mails so I do not have to backup mails on my powerbook. I even do most of development via ssh so my po
  • Sorry to hear that. Modern laptop harddisks are a problem. I can't recommend putting 2 into one laptop. This will drain to much power and also be too hot. (Well you can spin down the second disk, etc ...)

    What I can recommend is an "offsite" solution with a USB or Firewire 2.5" HDD Enclosure, preferably USB which drains the power from the laptop.

    rsync once a day, and/or after a hacking session and you will be fine ... hopefully ;-)

    The great plus is that you can use the rsynced hd in every computer without op
  • My laptop doesn't carry a second drive. It could if I could find the right ultrabay adapter for it, but I couldn't. So I decided to attach a small USB drive to the exterior. This works perfectly. It takes over an hour of battery life, but the feeling my data's a little safer is worth it.

    My next laptop will be an ultraportable, though, and to that I don't want to glue anything. It also doesn't have an optical drive that I could replace. It has a single cardbus slot, but I use that for EDGE. I'm currently thi
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