On 05/02 04:40 , Chris Baker wrote:
> BackupPC actually recommends software RAID over hardware RAID. Please let me
> know what you think.

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. 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. 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.

With a 3ware hardware RAID controller and good-quality hot-swap drive bays;
you go to the web or command line interface for the array, remove the failed
drive from the array, pull the drive, put in the new one, tell the 3ware
controller to add it back in, and rebuild the array. Done.

I *have* seen 3ware controllers flake out. Hardware dies, it's a fact of
life. Have a spare if you can.

I've not known a well set up 3ware controller to be a bottleneck to
performance.

Other RAID controlers I've worked with (Promise Supertrak, Dell
PERC/CERC/flavor-of-the-month) all suck by comparison. Usually because their
management interfaces are vile or even non-functional on Linux; but
occasionally because (in the case of the Supertrak) they'd flake out and
corrupt data -- badly.

I hear that Areca (sp?) controllers are good; but the Linux driver for them
sucks badly. They work better on Solaris or FreeBSD.

My advice is to buy a 3ware controler for your disk array. The management
interface alone is worth it. 

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

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