On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 12:49, Alvin Oga wrote: --snip-- > 3ware (raid cards) has readily available and easily understandable raid > drivers for their cards > > hw raid -- you're stuck with what they give you for driver support > and monitoring > > sw raid .. do what you like to your hearts content .. I've been using a 3ware board for a while now with no problems. The kernel drivers for it are GPL'd, so you're not really 'stuck' as long as you don't mind doing some kernel hacking. :) > > 3) My need for using these controllers is to have the ability to add extra disk > > and I do not need their RAID features. > > neither hardware/software raid does not lend itslef too easily to "expand > your raid" to larger capacity > - you cannot merely add a disk > > - you have to have a resizable partition and resizable fs to "add > a new disk" to add mroe capacity to your 100% full raid subsystem If all you want is to be able to enlarge the array at any given time, your best bet is to just use regular old IDE/SCSI drives and boards. I believe you can tack on drives to a JBOD array, but I'm not sure. Personally, I use RAID since I can't afford SCSI but still need really good performance. > raid is too much trouble for the benefits one gets > > - you want raid iff .. > - you cannot afford for that data to go offline > - you have the $$$ to have a 2nd raid backup system > - you can sync data correctly from raid1 to raid2 > - you lose more $$$ in being offline than you would be manually > rebuilding a new disk and restore from backups > > - you want to protect your system against one disk failure > and you know what the mtbf is for your cpu, memory, fans, disks, > and general user admin boo-boos and go offline anyway RAID is also good if you need better performance than offered by regular IDE disks. RAID10 will give you excellent backups at speeds comparable to RAID0. > you can have up to 12 (ide)disks in a raid subsystem > and even mroe in scsi based raids > - i dont know of anybody with more than 12 ide disks in their raid > or willing to play with that much data in an untested manner > - you'd be on the bleeding edge at more than 12 ide disks If you're going to use more than 12 disks, you'll need a dedicated enclosure. And if you can afford one of those, you can also afford SCSI disks, in which case you can have a nice 10+ disk SCSI RAID array with a hot-swappable external enclosure. That's bleeding edge. (The pricetag will also make your eyes bleed though...) -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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