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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
