Danny Sauer wrote:
The only thing you get with software RAID is less money spent and more obscure admin tools.
Hardware controllers all come with pretty obscure sets of admin tools, too. I've used the occasional Mylex RAID controller in the past and they certainly aren't very standard.
And loss of the ability to hot-swap drives, supposedly.
If your general hot-swap setup works, it'll work with software RAID too. raidhotadd and raidhotremove work just fine.
As far as the fans and power supplies go, well, a properly designed case *will* have redundant cooling.
The case perhaps yes, but will the power-supply and the CPU? I have an older Compaq Proliant that has dual power-supply, dual (well, quad) case/CPU fans, but doesn't automatically ship with ECC memory. I think that says something about the importance of power-supplies & fans vs. ECC memory. (or at least what Compaq thought of it :-).
I'm sitting next to 2 machines with hotswap IDE drives, both are running Linux. One's running SuSE, the other's running Gentoo on a PPC. One has the drives hooked to a 3Ware RAID card, the other has the drives in a firewire enclosure. The firewire machine is running software RAID over 8 drives, with LVM on top of the RAID. I've hot-swapped drives in both systems, multiple times, while the system is under load, and had 0 problems.
Firewire is not IDE - obviously your Firewire box understands hotswapping, but I'm impressed that the hot-swap worked for the drives connected directly over IDE. I really did not think Linux was up it. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- http://www.spamchek.com/freetrial - sign up for your free 30-day trial now!