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Data integrity and RAID

DISCUSSION peter.stevens 2 participants 2 messages Dec 9, 2008 1 message not in the archive

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I'm looking for a software solution to help replace my existing raid hardware setup. The hardware mimics RAID-1 (in that it has 3 mirrors), except for the fact that on read all 3 mirrors are compared and possibly error corrected before data is returned. I don't neccessarily need a RAID-1 solution, it just seems closer to what I already have and also that it also can recover from 2 simulateous disk failures.

So far I've played with a software RAID-1 array of USB flash drives. My issue is that software RAID-1 does not check for or recover from data corruption unless a read or write to disk actually fails. Integrity is a major concern for me, I need to know that all data going to and from disk is correct at all times.

All advice and comments are welcomed.

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#2 lore raw

At the moment, I would recommend using two drives in a raid1, and rsync to the third. Then use some scripts with sha1sum to compare between the raid and the rsync'd copy, which would effectively be a backup copy. You could use a fuse filesystem called chironfs
http://www.furquim.org/chironfs/ to 'mirror' at the file level, and sha1 or diff to compare all the disks at some regular interval. chiron reads from the primary disk by default, and writes out to all disks. I don't know of anything that reads all, compares, tiebreaks, and repairs on each file access. I suspect that would perform quite badly.

Quoted 15 lines · peter.stevens

I'm looking for a software solution to help replace my existing raid hardware setup. The hardware mimics RAID-1 (in that it has 3 mirrors), except for the fact that on read all 3 mirrors are compared and possibly error corrected before data is returned. I don't neccessarily need a RAID-1 solution, it just seems closer to what I already have and also that it also can recover from 2 simulateous disk failures.

So far I've played with a software RAID-1 array of USB flash drives. My issue is that software RAID-1 does not check for or recover from data corruption unless a read or write to disk actually fails. Integrity is a major concern for me, I need to know that all data going to and from disk is correct at all times.

All advice and comments are welcomed.