What if the snap dies?

[radio]

What if the snap dies?

I am reconfiguring a 4000 to mirror the drives. I was using raid 5 for security in case one of the drives failed. Then I realized that if the snap itself failed I would be SOL. I can't wait for another good deal on ebay, shipping, etc.

I decided to loose a little usable space and have two sets of mirrors. Again I am wondering what happens if the snap dies?

I understand the snap uses BSD, so I can't slap a drive into an XP machine, or linux for that matter. How do I recover data quickly?

Any Ideas? Any experiences?

Thanks
oidar

[blue68f100]

You have to use another snap. But this is true with most any RAID system. The reason Backup's are Still Required.

If you use a UPS HW failures are very very low with these units. The 4000 has a history of bad power supplies. Well not bad, unless you over load them. The new larger HD pull more current on the 12 v buss, to spin the drives up. This only last for a few seconds. So you do not want to be turning these off and on daily. They are design for 24/7 operation.

Raid 5 is a redundant array, that waste less space than raid1.

I always recommend testing your systems. If you find out you have a hw v1 or 2 you will run into a problem if a drive fails. It requires a simple IDE cable mod to correct the proplem. So check your HW version, usually it's posted with -00x after the part no.

So before you put your system on line, test your system by failing drive 2 and see if it reports correctly. Then go through the recovery process, power down and re connect the drive. These are NOT HOTSWAP units. The you will know what to do if a drive does fail.

I hope this answered your question.

[Phoenix32]

While this is not the answer I think you were looking for, in the case of enterprise usage, you must have redundant backups. Given the value of the data, it just isn't worth not spending the money on backups. In this case, another SNAP Server backing up the in use SNAP Server with something like S2S.

In the case of using mirrors, it -might- be possible to use a BSD system to read the drives, but I can't say for sure. I know the SNAP OS was not straight BSD, it is a modified version. Did they mess with the file structure? I don't know. Maybe one of our Software gurus here can answer that one, I am a hardware guy.

[blue68f100]

Like I said above, Only another SNAP can read it.

[radio]

Well, you are right, it's not the answer I was looking for. It's not that the data is unreplacable, but I need access to it right away.

I have broken the raid array, and I'll probably do the same with the mirror. I also have plenty of backups, but on slow tape.

I was hoping someone was going to say they tried using a vmware bsd clone (hummm, now there's an applience!) or Knoppix or the like to recover data. but I but I guess you guys would know that already. I guess at this point its just speculation.

That's what I liked about freeNAS. If it breaks, youi just pickup another $50 computer and install in minutes. I have to admit I've never tried it though.

oidar

[blue68f100]

We have been looking and playing with FreeNAS. Like what we see. I'm tring to see what is required to make it run on a Dell715N. Things keep getting in the way.

The Snap OS uses a heavyly modified XFS file system on BSD. If you have DD or some cloning software that can do a RAW copy to another HD. You will beable to play. FreeBSD 6.1 add XFS support, required to add a line for it to mount it.

The Guardian OS is running on Linux (redhat). So it is possiable to read them. But you still need to deal with the RAID drives.