Re: Promise or 3Ware?
In article <[🔎] 200403250941.47599@fortytwo.ch>,
Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder <avbidder@fortytwo.ch> wrote:
>On Wednesday 24 March 2004 18.58, Derrick 'dman' Hudson wrote:
>> I now need to buy some hardware to set up a 2-disk RAID-1 array for a
>> server. The server will run debian with kernel 2.6. The cost
>> (money-wise) is not really an issue. The disks are ATA/133 (already
>> purchased). Which would you recommend, and why?
>>
>> Promise FastTrak TX2000 controller
>> with 2 Promise SuperSwap 1000 host-swappable drive bays
>>
>> 3Ware Escalade 7006-2 controller (or 7506-4LP model)
>> with 1 3Ware RDC-400 hot-swappable drive cage
>
>For RAID 1 with only 2 disks, neither.
>
>The driver problems with promise were mentioned, and the 3ware probably is
>overkill. Have you thought about using software RAID? Yes, it uses a bit more
>CPU and doubles the PCI bus load, compared with the 3ware (dunno about
>Promise - I'm not sure if it does RAID1 in hardware).
The problem with software raid is that if the first (boot) disk
goes south, the system won't boot anymore. If you're using RAID1
just for data integrity and don't care if you have to open up the
machine and replace the disk to get it going again, then that's
no problem. If you want to maximize uptime, use hardware RAID1/RAID5.
But if you wanted to minimize downtime, you'd have bought hot-swappable
SATA disks anyway, I guess.
If you're going to do software RAID1 - the latest 2.6.5-rc kernel
supports partitionable RAID1 so you can just RAID1 2 entire disks
instead of just the partitions. I've updated sysvinit to work
correctly on such a system (root partition with dynamic major device).
I think I should convert our internal dutch documentation to an
english MINI-HOWTO one of these days.
Mike.
--
Netu, v qba'g yvxr gur cynvagrkg :)
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