RAID options under Fedora
Eric J. Feldhusen
efeldhusen at chartermi.net
Wed Nov 26 21:14:09 UTC 2003
On Nov 26, 2003, at 10:59 AM, <pctech at mybellybutton.com> wrote:
> Personal Choice: I would take hardware RAID over
> software RAID any three days of the week.
My caveat to the above, make sure what you buy is a true hardware RAID,
not a pci card with multiple ide/scsi ports and software to drive the
raid. I've seen this on promise cards *there are other brands that do
the same* and on motherboards with promise chips. My simple test for
this is that whatever the card/chipset, if it's a true hardware raid,
it should not need any type of drivers for whatever os is installed.
There may be utilities to monitor the raid from the operating system,
but not to run the RAID.
If you have pci RAID card that's a software/hardware combo, I've had
enough trouble with it, I'll go with linux software raid any day over
the combo card any day.
As far as the reliability/speed/performance of Linux software raid, I
was just discussing this with a fellow school system administrator, and
he's been using software raid in a RAID 1 *mirroring* under linux for
1400 users on 400 client machines from a single server with dual
p2/350's with scsi drives for several years. Performance is excellent
and he's had a couple of hard drive failures that he's replaced and
rebuilt the mirrors with no problems.
More information about the users
mailing list