Archive for October 2008
A bit late to the party with this one, as he started whilst I was on holiday, but Linux create Linus Torvalds has started his own blog.
It’s interestingly entitled ‘Torvalds Family Blog’, although Linus being Linus I’m sure we’ll see some excellent highly controversial non-family posts, just like his mailing list postings.
I just finished reading a very interesting paper analysing data corruption which occurs at the drive level. Subtle data corruption like this is a nightmare for any system. Because it’s so hard to spot, it’s perfectly possible that even in a well-maintained system the corruption could occur on all backups, simply because it can go un-noticed for so long.
This paper demonstrates that RAID6 (ADG) is strongly advisable, not only for systems with lots of disks, but also for those with bigger disks. Many customers are put off by the disk space wastage RAID 6 creates – this paper shows that the extra expense is certainly worthwhile.
