hw vs sw raid (was Re: [TriLUG] RAID newbie question...)

[Jason Tower]

> i have the same question that ken has - given the relative slowness
> of ide, and since i'm only doing this for redundancy, not for
> performance, is there any reason to buy an ide raid card?  or is
> software raid sufficient for this kind of use?

IDE is not particularly slow, it's just that heavy IDE activity tends to 
make the system unresponsive to other processes (like user requests).  
the 2.4.21 kernel supposedly makes some improvements in this area, 
although i haven't tried them out yet (i really ought to since i'm 
running 2.4.21 on my laptop with severn).  so for a dedicated backup 
box i wouldn't let IDE's "slowness" stand in your way, even with 
software raid.  go for it!

true story: last year i was called in to fix a system that used software 
raid 1 on a data partition (but not the other partitions).  one of the 
disks had failed and the system would no longer boot.  i slapped a 
knoppix cd in the drive, brought it up, mounted the remaining raid 
partition, and scp'd the data to another system.  software raid 1 is a 
good thing :-)

jason