On Monday 15 December 2008 20:38:59 Mark Knecht wrote: > One reason to be concerned about ANY software RAID solution would be > that when you boot something like a gparted CD to do some work you > won't necessarily have the right driver on the CD so you won't be able > to see the devices. A true hardware RAID card can (to the best of my > knowledge) always be accessed by the system.
That's largely true, but only while the drives are still in the same system. We are discussing the disgusting cheap crappy motherboard RAID out there, try swapping motherboards out on one of those and see what happens. Tip: the motherboard does not believe the drives belong to it anymore. At the other end of the spectrum we have the good quality hardware RAID, like what my manager insists we use at work (exclusively Dell). 100+ machines, history going back 5 years, no failures, no screwups, no data loss due to funky RAID. Plenty of drives failed though - the data center can get pretty hot (this is Africa after all). So given the choice between crappy mb RAID and software RAID, I'm putting my money where the debugger lives - kernel-based sw RAID. If my boot CD does not support it, it's a trivial matter to fetch and burn another CD. Heck, I can go through the DC door and take my pick from whatever happens to be lying on 5TB of assorted stuff on the ftp server. With an mb RAID gone south, I have no such options and run the serious risk of losing everything after hardware failure. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
