[ale] raid suggestions

[Jim Kinney]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Jim Lynch <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com>wrote:

> On 02/09/2012 04:35 PM, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> > May or may not have true-HW-based RAID available.
> >
> > On 2/9/12 3:37 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> >> Hardware based (for true RAID) because it doesn't require CPU cycles.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> H
> Has the concern about the possibility of the hardware controller
> breaking and being out of production been eliminated?  At one time I
> recall the suggestion that using hardware raid was a bad idea because if
> the controller went OTL and there wasn't another available you'd get to
> start from scratch.  I believe this concern was with the controllers on
> the MB however.
>
> That of course can be alleviated by proper backups.  I always thought
> that was somewhat meaningless in a lot of cases 'cause I'd think many
> raid installations were to support a backup set of drives.  Not all, of
> course, but surely that's a common purpose for a raid set.
>

Even good hardware cards can fail. It's become better with modern raid
cards writing some data to the drives about configuration. However it still
is a huge SPoF waiting to happen. NOTHING beats the ability to pull out the
drives and put them into a different chassis entirely, point bios to the
boot drive and your're back up and running.

In fact, with software raid, it's easy to do a full backup by adding a
large hard drive as a single mirror device for a system.


>
> Jim.
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
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