Re: FORGOT TO CONFIGURE RAID! DELL POWEREDGE 2950

"Hannes Dorbath" <light(at)theendofthetunnel(dot)de> writes:

> From the DELL site it seems this `PERC 5/i' on board controller
> (assuming that's what you have) doesn't even have a BBU. If you don't
> plan to post here in a few weeks again about data corruption, go out and
> shop a serious controller.

This is a bit of a strange comment. A BBU will improve performance but
Postgres doesn't require one to guarantee data integrity.

If your drives have write caching disabled (ie write-through) and your
controller does write-through caching and you leave fsync=on and
full_page_writes=on which is the default then you shouldn't have any data
integrity issues.

Note that many drives, especially IDE drives ship with write caching enabled
(ie, write-back).

And without a BBU many people are tempted to set fsync=off which improves
performance at the cost of data loss on a system crash or power failure. With
a BBU there's no advantage to fsync=off so that temptation to risk data loss
is removed.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com