[TriLUG] raid cards

[Jason Tower]

but can you hot swap a failed sata disk using software raid?  i've never 
tried but i wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it borked the system 
completely.  and how will you know which disk has failed?  hardware raid 
cards will usually tell you (via blinky lights) which disk is bad so you 
can replace it on the fly.  that's the thing about hardware raid - it's 
completely abstracted from the OS so you can do these things without the 
  system knowing about it.  software raid is terrific in many 
circumstances but it does have limitations.

jason

Brian Weaver wrote:
> I have two 3ware hardware raid cards and I concur with Jason; they are
> great. That being said I don't think I would go with a *Hardware* RAID
> solution again for any Linux box that I build in the future.
> 
> My main concern is that if one of my 3ware RAID cards die, how am I
> suppose to get the data off the drives? I don't know how 3ware chose
> to write that information or maintain the array information. So I'm
> stuck with trying to find a new compatable card at what may be an
> outrageous price.
> 
> With software RAID the particulars of the implementation is open. If
> your MotherBoard or Disk Controller dies then you can just replace it
> so long as the hard drives themselves are OK.
> 
> Just something to consider
> 
> -Brian
> 
> On 2/15/06, Jason Tower <jason at cerient.net> wrote:
> 
>>if you want hardware raid go with 3ware cards, they're excellent.  i
>>have two of them running in a storage server running centos41:
>>
>>[jason at samsclub ~]$ df -h
>>Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>>/dev/sdb1             1.9T  1.2T  625G  66% /share1
>>/dev/sdc1             1.4T  838G  468G  65% /share2
>>
>>jason
>>
>>
>>Wing D Lizard wrote:
>>
>>>I want to add a raid-1 to a server ( supermicro x5dal).  Since the
>>>motherboard doesn't support hw raid, I'm looking at pci sata
>>>cards.
>>>
>>>Intrex has a couple:
>>>
>>>  CON-SATAR - sil3112a chipset
>>>  CON-TX2300 - promice fastrack tx2300 ( SATA II??)
>>>
>>>has anybody tried either of these?  Any problems?
>>>
>>>Can you boot from a sata drive with these cards?
>>>
>>>Is there any reason to stay away from fc3/4?  CentOS?
>>>
>>>The server is a LAMP server, supporting an accounting app
>>>(ARIA), and a few odds and ends  ( phplive, etc).
>>>
>>>brett
>>>
>>>
>>
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> 
> 
> 
> --
> 
> /* insert witty comment here */