Re: Advice: Hardware vs. Software RAID5

[Scott Gifford <sgifford@suspectclass.com>]

tofu.oni@gmail.com writes:

[...]

> The motherboard I'm using is an intel d945gnt.  It has an intel Martix
> driver that will let me do RAID 5 in the bios.  Then, linux should see
> one big whopping device.  That sounds like the easiest solution to me.
>
> Option two is to use linux software RAID.  I've never done that
> before, but I can learn.

I have had bad luck with RAID state information being available from
the OS with hardware RAID.  For example, with software RAID I can run
a cronjob every 10 minutes to tell me if a drive has failed; with
hardware RAID often the mechanisms to do that are not available from
Linux.

Also, some hardware RAID systems require the system to be offline to
do a rebuild, which is less than ideal.

I have mostly used software RAID for the last few years, though only
RAID 1, and have been very pleased with it.

You might want to take a closer look at the details of how your
particular RAID controller works to see if it suffers from these
limitations.

----Scott.