In <[🔎] 4C69742E.3080200@hardwarefreak.com>, Stan Hoeppner wrote: >martin f krafft put forth on 8/16/2010 10:26 AM: >>> I prefer LSI and Intel raid cards. I should have said merely LSI >>> as the Intel cards are licensed LSI cards. Hardware raid isn't as >>> flexible as softraid as it works at the entire disk level, but boy >>> is it so much easier to work with, >> >> … until your controller dies and you find out that the manufacturer >> does not support the firmware anymore and your data are lost. > >Ever heard of spares? If not you've not been in this game long. Keeping the firmware versions in sync between production and spares is difficult to say the least. I've also found the kernel / mdadm maintainers a lot more responsive to issues in their stack than I have found the manufacturer of my HW RAID card when I have found issues in their firmware. >>> as much faster. >> >> Do you have research backing that up? > >You're kidding right? If not, Google is your friend here. My experience is that there's no speed difference between my (at the time) expensive HW RAID system and my (at the time) expensive CPUs handling software RAID. Except in rare cases, it is more $-efficent to buy extra CPU power (on yout MB or processor shelf/drawer) that can be used by all processes than it is to buy dedicated CPU power (on your HW RAID card) that is only used for RAID tasks. >>> The single biggest advantage to hardware raid is that you don't >>> have to disk with changing bios boot order or anything like that >>> if you have to reboot while drive in your boot array is >>> offline/down/dead. It's all automatic. I've been required to enter the HW RAID BIOS interface to get a boot after a failure. I've also rebooted with failed or rebuilding arrays under the control of mdadm and did not have to deal with changing BIOS boot order. (and vice-versa, of course) I don't think it is correct to say that particular roadblock is always absent when dealing with HW RAID or always present when dealing with mdadm. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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