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Tried out software RAID in Fedora Core 5 the other day. RAID 1 with two identical 80GB drives. And when I mean tried out, I mean I unplugged the power cable from one of the drives while using the system. My coworker Chuck didn’t seem convinced that software RAID was acutally working unless this stunt was performed.
Madness, you say? True, true. Not something one should try at home. Not even silly old me. Luckily, it worked! I cut power to the second drive in the array during a full system upgrade. After a ton of IDE errors, the RAID subsystem eventually removed the faulty drive from the array. The upgrade proceeded without so much as a hiccup. Full recovery worked flawlessly after I powered off, plugged the drive back in, rebooted, and manually issued the command “mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/hdb1″.
Hey - I didn’t know you were back online - welcome back!
I don’t think that test is crucial to seeing it in action - it sounds like an awesome way to maybe trash your electrical system and your test disk, though. But I’m glad it worked out! Did it rebuild the mirror when you brought it back online?
Comment by Patrick — September 6, 2006 @ 2:04 pm CDT
Yep, after I told it to. Not sure if it would’ve happened automatically… I was too nervous to wait. :)
One thing I *didn’t* see was much of a speed improvement on disk reads. At least, I don’t think so.
Comment by adam — September 6, 2006 @ 5:29 pm CDT