On 05/05 01:00 , Les Mikesell wrote:
> Yes, I have nothing in particular against hardware raid, but like the 
> simplicity of software mirroring and the advantage of being able to 
> recover the data from any single drive.

Given your method of offsite backup (which is very clever; albeit requiring
clueful tending) this makes eminent sense.

> But this is consistent regardless of the actual controller involved. 
> With hardware raid, you'll have to track down different vendor's 
> instructions, and perhaps current drivers, separately for each type.

I've never needed to know anything about the disk driver, just to replace a
failed drive.

Having to track down the management software is problematic however;
especially in the case of Dell, because they seem to change their RAID
controllers about as often as most people change their underwear. Quite
often their management software can't even be made to work in the machine
the controller is installed in.

This is why I like 3ware. Just access the web interface, and it's all
menu-driven and easily discoverable from there. If it wasn't for that, I
probably would like software RAID better than a lot of the hardware RAID
controllers.

> And if I were doing it, I'd expect to spend half a day on the 3ware site 
> looking for the instructions.

Only needed to spend a couple of minutes looking at the 'destructions' the
first time I used one. Their management interface is really good; and the
drivers are very good and integrated directly into the main tree of the
Linux kernel.

> Mdadm is pretty good about warning you if you try something stupid. 

True; but I've still managed to blow away data accidentally using it. :)
(Fortunately, I still had a copy of the data on another disk's partition; I
sync'ed the wrong partitions together).

> Fdisk, not so much - but you have to deal with it sometimes anyway.

I've actually done much better historically with fdisk than with mdadm, when
it comes to avoiding serious fsckups. YMMV.

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com

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