[ale] raid suggestions

[Lightner, Jeff]

All I can say is I’ve been using hardware RAID cards almost exclusively in Linux systems here for the last 7 years and have not lost a single system due to the concerns raised here.   Sure some have gone down due to controller issues in that time but getting them back running hasn’t been a problem.   I’m no more concerned about controller hardware failures than I am about drive and DIMM failures.   They occur – your replace the failed parts and move on.






________________________________
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim Kinney
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2012 9:36 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] raid suggestions


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

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