[ale] motherboard RAID versus software RAID

[Christopher Fowler]

I have many servers using Software RAID installed.  These server do it
via SATA and the controller is on the motherboard.

I've seen thse two problems.

1.  Sometimes a drive will be dropped from the raid.  Not sure why but
    sometimes it happens

2.  I've had one case where the ext3 filesystem on a RAID1 device 
    became corrupted and unreadable.  The software raid simply copied
    this corruption across 2 drives.  I never figured out why and was 
    never to explain to the customer why I had to totally reinstall FC2
    even though he had RAID1 with 2 good drives.   Maybe something
    went stupid in the RAID1 driver that wrote bad data that screwed
    everything.

So.  I now have these server mail me a report every night telling me the
status of the raid.  That is the only way I've been able to monitor it.


mdadm -D /dev/md0 | mail ......


On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:10 -0500, John Wells wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> I've been running software RAID on one of my servers for some time. It
> works very well.
> 
> I'm now out of space, and am planning to add two additional SATA 250 GB
> drives tonight as an additional RAID 1 array.  I also recently upgraded
> the motherboard to an ASUS A7V-600X. The motherboard has a RAID option for
> SATA drives...as I've never owned any serial ATAs before it's gone unused.
> 
> Would you recommend going with Linux's software RAID for these two drives,
> or should I go with the motherboard's RAID? I have no idea of the quality
> of the MB raid, and I suspect Linux's software RAID might offer more
> flexibility, but wanted to hear opinions from the group.
> 
> Thanks, as always!
> John
> 
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