One other thing that (I think) should be added to the Hardware/Software RAID
discussion is the availability of the system when a drive goes bad. I've
got an AIC-7880 controller running software RAID and it works OK if a disk
read/write error occurs. But, if a drive totally dies the SCSI bus goes
into reset and the system is not available (I've had it essentially infinite
loop on this -- reboot required and then RAID recovers). I'm pretty sure
this is controller specific but it's EXTREMELY important from an
availability point of view (vs reliability). I can't imagine a Hardware
RAID solution that would have this problem.
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Dave Wreski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 30, 1999 11:39 PM
Subject: Re: Hardware RAID Solutions
On Sat, 29 May 1999, Dave Wreski wrote:
> I thought somoene might know how the performance of the software raid
> support is versus (the typical) hardware raid?
>
> Hmm.. Maybe there's even a generalization that can be made?
Search around a bit. Everything I remember reading is that software
RAID-5 (in a beefy system...say dual PII-450 or similar) runs circles
around most hardware RAID-5 controllers. Hardware RAID gives you things
like the ability to easily boot from a RAID device, and automated hot
spares and rebuilds. As software RAID improves and gets easier to manage,
there may be little reason to go with hardware RAID.
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