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Re: hardware raid vs. software raid



On Thursday, 30.11.2006 at 16:56 +0100, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:

> On 30.11.06 15:44, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> > Preparing to buy a new server...
> > 
> > What is debian's opinion about hardware/software raid?
> > 
> > I have the feeling that software raid 1 is more reliable since if
> > anything goes wrong with the hardware, I could just take one or two
> > disks out of the server and put them into a workstation to get up and
> > running or copy data of the disks for the time until the hardware gets
> > fixed.
> 
> it highly depends on the hardware raid. The true hardware RAID with
> hotspare, hotswap etc. support and with proper drivers (so you won't have to
> boot into its bios to reconfigure it) will be much more reliable.
> 
> > On the other hand, performance will probably be better with a dedicated
> > hardware raid controller.
> 
> it highly depends on the hardware raid. The true hardware RAID with XOR
> counting and mirroring support will be much faster.

Although it's worth pointing out that software RAID-*1* (one of the
options under consideration) has almost no CPU overhead, and is often a
good low-cost option.

Part of your decision must rest on what exactly the machine will be
doing.  Different RAID setups are best suited for different usage
patterns, e.g. RAID-5 is often a good general-purpose storage server
option, RAID-10 is usually recommended for database servers, etc.

Dave.
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