On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Bill McGonigle <[email protected]> wrote: > Yeah, if you've got local disk connectivity, software RAID is usually > faster and more stable than hardware RAID, and is certainly more portable.
Software RAID is portable across hardware, but not operating systems. Hardware RAID is portable across operating systems, but not hardware. In other words: I can't share a software RAID disk set between Linux and Windows. I can't share a hardware RAID disk set between Compaq and Dell. Which scenario is more likely to trouble any given person will vary. :) I've found hardware RAID to be more reliable when booting with a degraded disk set. A smart controller will just fail the bad member disk and ignore it. Software-based solutions -- which don't kick in until the OS is running -- sometimes get caught up trying to boot from a failed disk. If you've got CPU power to spare -- and these days, almost every server does -- software RAID will generally be a lot faster than a dedicated ASIC. Cheap RAID controllers, especially, tend to be really slow. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
