On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 03:38:49PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 11:41:03AM +1100, Alex Samad wrote: > > This begs the question why did you pick hardware raid over software raid > > You can boot from it no matter what (software raid can require interesting > tweaks to the boot loader setup to make it work). my rule of thumb is to always have atleast 2 partitions on the first 2 drives (3 if I have them), for a raid1 /boot and a raid1 /. the rest of the space is put into a raid device then into lvm. That gets rid of the interesting tweaks. > > Recovery can be transparent to the OS and be as simple as swapping out > the drive that failed. true > > You get nice hotswap bay LED control to show which drive has failed > (I imagine software could do this too, but I have never seen that > happen yet.) true > > > I have been a long supporter of software raid, but I find myself leaning > > towards a HP smart array 400 and using hardware raid (looking at 10 > > disks in raid6). > > > > My current thoughts are why should I have 10 channels (4 of them come > > from 1 pcix card) when I could have 1 channel to the smart array. there > > seem to be a few cciss utilities for me to track the array > > > > > > I am waying this up against the ability to easily manage the array and > > do upgrade and change disk and monitor the individual disks > > Some hardware raids have good support for monitoring under linux. > Some do not. Having monitoring is quite important. is that monitoring of the raid drives or the actual drives underneath, I like having smartctl to give me access to the actual drive health > > The biggest advantage to software raid is that it is hardware independant. > You can move all the disks to another controller type on another system, > and linux's software raid will still work. Hardware raid setups are > often very specific to one controller type so recovery from a controller > failure can be tricky if you don't have access to spares. I have gone through a few cycles of changing the underlying drive sizes, ie a 3 disk raid5 made up of 3 x 500Gb and replacing in line with 3 x TB. pop 1 disk replace with 1 TB once it has settled you can do an online expansion. Not sure if you can do that on a HW raid. > > -- > Len Sorensen > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-amd64-REQUEST@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org > > -- "I suspect that had my dad not been president, he'd be asking the same questions: How'd your meeting go with so-and-so? ... How did you feel when you stood up in front of the people for the State of the Union Address--state of the budget address, whatever you call it." - George W. Bush 03/09/2001 in an interview with the Washington Post
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