Messages in this thread |  | | From | (Mike Bristow) | Subject | Re: Disk Mirroring | Date | 12 Sep 1996 22:32:50 GMT |
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In article <Pine.BSD.3.91.960912053226.22974F-100000@defender.lm.com>, John_Wier <jbw@telerama.lm.com> writes: >Can anyone tell me if there is a way of mirroring disks in Linux? We use >this approach at work to give our system online redundance so if a disk >starts to go bad, we break the mirror and take the offending disk/partitions >off line until the repair/replacement is done. Since all data is >duplicated on the mirror device, the user has no idea that a disk failure >has occured. > You're after RAID support. Doesn't exist (yet). Very Clever People are working on it...
For the cuurent state of play, look into md.
shivan:~> cat /usr/src/linux/Documentation/Changes [...] Multiple device ===============
Multiple device support (allowing you to group several partitions into one logical device) has also been added. Check out ftp://sweet-smoke.ufr-info-p7.ibp.fr/pub/Linux/md035.tar.gz to try this out.
[...]
As I understand it, this is never as good as a special RAID controller. <simplifcation> This is a very clever box, which pretends to be a SCSI (or whatever) HDD while actually containing 9 (or whatever) real SCSI HDD's. As far as Linux is concerned, it's just got a SCSI HDD, and doesn't care any more. </simplifcation>
These are normally better than a software solution, because you can do things like take out a broken HDD, and replace it, while the system is online.
They are, howvere, expensive....
Mike -- The best UK M:tG tourney page: http://www.shivan.demon.co.uk/tourney/
(Not that I'm biased ;)
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