[tdubhro1]

Deosn't RAID usually at least give some warning if you watch the syslogs? (Genuine question, I am not a sysadmin, we have linux servers with hetzner on software raid 1 and a couple have had single-disk issues which we spotted straight away in zenoss and had hetzner replace the disk. Am I incorrect in thinking this is normal?)

[dsr_]

RAID is a method for surviving hardware failure. If you have a software failure in, say, the VFS layer, RAID will happily accept the order to write garbage all over your inode trees and will carefully store and make sure that all the appropriate disks can return the same garbage every time. And yes, it should warn you when you need to replace a disk which is no longer returning the right garbage.

Similarly, if you rm -rf a vital directory tree, RAID can ensure that it goes away reliably.

[andrewcooke]

yes you're right. so replies will now switch to how they don't stop you from deleting data, because... well, i have no idea why. it seems to just be a law of nature.