configuration choices with Dell CERC (adaptec 2610SA)

[user]

First off, thank you very much for your help.

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, Scott Long wrote:

> The problem is not with filesystem corruption, it's with parity 
> corruption.  It's possible to get a situation where a stripe is
> partially written out and then interrupted by a power failure, leaving
> the parity inconsistent with the stripe.  You won't notice this until
> it's time to rebuild a failed drive from the parity, and then you'll
> get corruption.


I will only be creating mirrors.  Is a mirror impervious to this, or are
the potential problems even worse ?  (my guess is impervious .. ?)

What's the worst thing that could happen to a mirror, with write caching
turned on for the array (not for the disks - I'll take your advice on not
turning on write caching on the disks) that suffers a power failure ?


> It would be better to let the rebuild happen as fast as possible.  Disks
> have a bad habit of failing in groups, and you don't want to increase
> the chance of a multi-disk failure by making recovery slow.


So again ... only using mirrors ... and in a two-drive chassis, I can't
have a hot spare, so I am not sure if it even really matters what I set
that to ... comments ?

Thanks so much for your help and comments.