On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 6:48 PM, Jason Bailey, Sun Advocate Webmaster
I've always felt software raid was too much of a tax on the system, not to mention less reliable (regardless of OS).
Wrong on both counts. So wrong that merely stating that indicates you have never even used software raid. You just went out and spent the money, and never looked back. I manage several servers all of them loafing along at under 2% utilization under heavy data access traffic from a multitude of work stations. That's 2% total system utilization for both samba and RAID combined. Software raid is fast, and lightweight. With a raid card your system never gets any faster than that card. Beef up the server, and its still as slow as the card. Software raid improves with each server upgrade. And if ever have one disk crash or a controller fail with hardware raid you have to go find another card to match, because the remaining raid drives are recorded using a proprietary scheme that is not transportable. With software raid you can mix scsi, ide, sata drives, and actually gain performance by doing so. With hardware raid you are locked into a specific type of disk, and usually a specific SIZE of disk. As for less reliable, I've had disks fail over time 8 years using software raid, but regardless of raid type (1 or 5) I've never lost any data. And when drives did fail, recovery of the array was as simple as installing the replacement disk (or inserting a new hot-spare). Raid rebuild happened totally in the back ground without any down time beyond what was necessary for the actual disk swap. In one server, with hot removable drives, a drive swap on the fly was a total non-event. The users never knew it happened. -- ----------JSA--------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org