[TriLUG] Ubuntu FakeRAID or Software

[John Brier]

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 7:36 PM, Brian Blater <brb.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,

> Now I'm wondering if I would be better off ditching the FR and going
> with a Software RAID - I'll call it SR? Is there any benefit of the FR
> over the SR? One other thing I would like to try and test is
> ATA-over-Ethernet. Would FR or SR provide better performance for the
> AoE? I'm a little concerned about using SR as a couple of colleagues
> have problems where the RAID has failed after a few months or so and
> has to be rebuilt. Not sure what others experience has been with a SR?

I've used it one time with an nvidia board on RHEL 5 and Fedora, it
worked great. Anaconda detected it fine. maybe give Fedora a try?
Debian still is a little slow to pick up device mapper improvements
(at least in the installer) last I checked.

> Anyways, thanks for any help/advice you all can give me.

The advantage of Linux MD (Multi Device) RAID is that it will work on
any machine with Linux installed. Fake Raid will only work on systems
with the same Intel fakeraid chip.. so if your motherboard ever dies
your raid is unusable until you get another motherboard with the same
chip. With linux software raid you can take the array and hook it up
to prety much any machine with a linux distro and it should detect it
or at least allow you to activate it or recover it.

I don't know what happened with your colleagues, but I have used Linux
MD RAID on two different machines in RAID 5 setups for my file servers
for two years with no problems.