Henry wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] Mail Server purchasing decision' on Thu, Sep 02 at 08:34: [...]
That said, comments on flaky drivers are starting to worry me. Should I can the Ghost idea and rely on tarring/dumping to a Samba share on another server? That way I could use s/w RAID and avoid sketchy drivers.
I don't know who's complaining about flaky hardware raid drivers, but I've been using various big name raid cards under Linux for 10 years and have *never* had a problem with them. A hardware RAID card is pretty much the same from a driver perspective as a SCSI card, essentially. Just go with someone who's well supported. I like 3ware's products, but the other big names are fine too. As long as you're not using some POS promise card - which is as likely to have problems in hardware as in the drivers - you should be fine. And hardware RAID *is* better than software raid in an enterprise situation (you're not likely to be mixing IDE and SCSI drives there). Then again, I'd probably tell you to use Reiser for a server mailstore (if you're doing it the smart way w/ Maildir), and I don't recall ghost working nicely with Reiser. So ghost may not be an option anyway. :) --Danny, who uses rsync + hardlinks to make daily snapshots...