On Sat, 12 Jun 1999, Joao Rochate wrote:
Hi!
> Sorry if this isn't best fit on this list :/
It fits :)
> The question here is:
> * If I have a software RAID enabled system and my server fails, I can
> move all the disks to another server and use the same /etc/raidtab to
> get disks working again.
Yes. You'll have to carefully verify that the disks get recognised
in the same order, though, so old sda is now sda, old sdb is now sdb also,
etc...
> * If I have a hardware RAID system and server fails (also the RAID
> controler) can I just move the disks to another server with the same RAID
> card model and have the system working back again?
Yes, it's a matter of configuring the card identically. At least
in theory.
> I'm trying to do this cheap near-HA solution working. The software RAID
> takes too much time to rebuild a failed 40Gb RAID system, so I'm
> thinking of moving to a HW solution.
What?! I doubt it. "cheap near-HA solution" doesn't match with
that fastest rebuilds. The reason is simple. An entry/medium level hw
controller uses to have an iNTEL 960 risc 33/66/99 Mhz chip or similar.
This chip takes charge of xor'ing or whatever to produce the checksums,
mirrorings, and such.
Rebuilding mirrors is precisely one of the fields where sw raid
has strong advantage over hw raid, and the matter is simple: take a SMP
machine (pretty cheap nowadays). The less powerful one you could find
nowadays (.e.g., a 2xPPro) will fry a hw controller on rebuilding mirrors
or raid5. It has wayyy more powerful CPU horsepower to spend...
I'm speaking about latest alpha patches SW raid, not the previous
ones.
Ypu can even format and mount/use the mirror raid while it
rebuilds... isn't that cool?
> Still not sure if using another RAID card (even same model) will use the
> same RAID config.
You'll have to manually set it up, or load the config from a
floppy, if the controller lets yo store it, of course..
Greetings,
*****---(*)---**********************************************---------->
Francisco J. Montilla Systems & Network administrator
[EMAIL PROTECTED] irc: pukka Seville Spain
INSFLUG (LiNUX) Coordinator. www.insflug.org - ftp.insflug.org
