Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> 
> I've had experience with both software and hardware RAID. The short version
> is:
> It all sucks and will die on you in inconvenient and painful ways. Make sure
> your backups are good. Have a spare box on hand if at all possible.
> 
> That said; my experince with software RAID is that if one of the disks dies,
> the whole machine might fall over anyway. In most cases you have to down the
> box and reboot in order to swap in a new drive.

That's typically related to IDE (PATA) hardware, not anything to do with 
RAID.  SCA (swappable scsi) or SATA in a swappable tray wouldn't have 
those issues.

 > Also, if you're using this
> array as your boot drive; it's easy to screw up or otherwise fail to have a
> bootable drive, when the first drive dies.

Worst-case is that you boot a CD in rescue mode and reinstall grub 
(there's only 2 choices, depending on how the system sees the 2nd drive 
when the first fails...).  And you should know how to do that in any 
case since other things can go wrong.


> This gets very hasslesome and
> time-consuming to fix; and when the customer is paying for it at $175/hr
> (yes, we work cheap) time is of the essence.

That's a problem with consultants...  The plus side of software raid is 
that there are no other dependencies.  If you have nothing left but one 
drive (assuming raid1) you can plug it into just about any 
hardware-compatible controller or even a cheap USB adapter and access 
the data.  With hardware controllers you'd probably need to keep 
matching spares on hand.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com





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