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Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:05:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Luke Dean <LukeD@pobox.com>
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Subject: RAID mirror really worked
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This isn't really a question, just a testimonial and a thank you to the 
people who make this work.

I've got a Promise TX2300 SATA Raid controller that I use on my FreeBSD 
fileserver at home.  It uses ataraid.  I've set up a simple two-drive 
mirror.  One of the drives has been sending me intermittent failure 
messages in the nightly emails for nearly a year - no more than one or two 
a month.  Last night it finally croaked.  The mirror broke, but it went 
into "degraded" mode and kept right on chugging along with no service 
interruption.
Today I took down the system, replaced the bad drive, rebuilt the array 
using Promise's BIOS tools (since that's how I built it originally), and 
everything is back to normal.

This was my first real drive failure with an inexpensive RAID card, and 
I'd always wondered if they could ease the pain of a hard drive failure. 
It looks like they can.

I should add that before this, on another system, I had a RAID controller 
failure.  A controller failure is a completely different scenario...