On Jun 29, 2007, at 17:06, Tom Buskey wrote: > What if the RAID card dies? Can you get a replacement that can > read the > RAID disks you have now?
Well, that's the real trick, now isn't it? In high-uptime-requirement sites, I require one of the following: * cluster of servers * software RAID * onsite spare for Hardware RAID controller (we're often too far north to qualify for onsite support contracts) I've seen a company with a smoked hardware RAID card that blew at 10PM on Friday going into a holiday weekend on a mission-critical server (that's why they bought a fancy RAID card for it after all). We were using forensics techniques to extract the non-backed-up data into Saturday morning. <-- that sucks Anecdotally I've had both hardware RAID (Adaptec, 3Ware, Compaq SmartRAID) and Linux software RAID (2.6.13, IIRC) hose the RAID structure on disk. Linux Software RAID is particularly bad about handling unreliable hardware conditions, like when your el-crapo Compaq BIOS throws extra APIC-whoziwhatzas and makes a USB disk go away. DAMHINT. Running a 3ware 95?? as a SATAII/NCQ controller, without RAID turned on, then Linux Software RAID on top of it, is so-far, bulletproof for my servers. Anybody here running a 3Ware on OpenSolaris? Software RAID under linux still lacks scripts to handle auto-rebuild under hardware replacement, even though the hardware is now capable, which is a sweet feature of hardware RAID cards. We talked about this here before and somebody send a perl script that is a good start. I haven't yet had the time to update it, but the procedure is straightforward. -Bill ----- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/ Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
