[Cialug] sata raid

[Josh More]

If a controller dies, you have to drop in a similar, if not identical,
controller and configure it properly.

With software RAID, you can use anything.  Also, I like the software
RAID ties directly in with the kernel RAID monitoring tools without
needing any special drivers.  Granted, that could just be my adaptec
experience talking, but I find that software RAID works better for me. 
When I was trying hardware RAID, I got the following interesting
problems.

1) The driver would not load cleanly without custom compilation from
vanilla (not running Gentoo)
2) My drive partitions and associated data would vaporize without
warning OR ALERTING
3) Drive failures would not alert.

With software raid, I get alerting built in, don't need to rebuild my
kernel every time there is a new release, and my data tends to stay
where I put it.  I find that the slight performance decrease is well
worth it.  Of course, if I were running a database or render farm, I'd
have a different viewpoint.  All I'm doing is storing data.


 

-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701



>>> "david l goodrich" <dlg at dsrw.org> 06/12/07 10:09 AM >>> 
On Tue, June 12, 2007 9:02 am, Daniel A. Ramaley wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 June 2007 08:39, dave at 58ghz.net wrote:
>>I also considered the software raid. It would be
>>suited to my needs, but I felt that recovery from a
>>drive failure would be faster and easier with a
>>hardware solution.
>
> With hardware RAID it may be easier to recover from drive failure,
but
> how easy is it to recover from a controller failure? If recovery is
> difficult, does it matter (i.e., how probable is a controller
failure
> versus drive failures)?
>

So what's the story with recovering from a controller failure?  I know
software raid can be recovered by configuring it identically on
another
computer.  Can you just drop in another controller when the first one
dies?
  -- david

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