Re: Storage server
On 9/10/2012 8:11 AM, Jon Dowland wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 09:51:05PM +0200, lee wrote:
>> Some people have argued it's even better to use software raid than a
>> hardware raid controller because software raid doesn't depend on
>> particular controller cards that can fail and can be difficult to
>> replace. Besides that, software raid is a lot cheaper.
>
> You also get transferrable skills: you can use the same tooling on different
> systems. If you have a heterogeneous environment, you may have to learn a
> totally different set of HW RAID tools for various bits and pieces, which
> can be a pain.
mdraid also allows one to use the absolute cheapest, low ball hardware
on the planet, and a vast swath of mdraid users do exactly that,
assuming mdraid makes it more reliable--wrong!
See the horror threads and read of the data loss in the last few years
of the linux-raid mailing list for enlightenment.
Linux RAID is great in the right hands when used for appropriate
workloads. Too many people are using it who should not be, and giving
it a bad rap due to no fault of the software.
Hardware RAID has a minimum price of entry, both currency and knowledge,
and forces one to use quality hardware and BCPs. Which is why you don't
often see horror stories about hardware RAID eating TBs of filesystems
and data. And when it does, it's usually because the vendor or user
skimped on hardware somewhere in the stack.
--
Stan
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