On Fri, 26 May 2000, Darren Evans wrote:
>
> Having spent a considerable amount of time trying to
> ascertain the stability of vinum under FreeBSD, i'm not
> confident in using it on a production box.
When I looked at Vinum last, it required some proprietary stuff from Veritas to
provide RAID-5 functionality. I don't know if that has been ``fixed'' by now,
but that certainly put me of.
>
> I don't know much (at the moment about Linux Software RAID),
> but would like to hear people's experience.
>
> It's a RAID 5 solution that interests me running with
> a SMP kernel.
All RAID levels with Ingo's patch are considered stable. They have all seen a
lot of testing, and are in production a lot of places.
I have 7 systems with RAID-1 or RAID-5 running, 6 in production, and having
seen disk failures being handled gracefully too, I have no doubts about using
Linux Software RAID for critical systems. In fact I usually recommend it for
critical systems.
It's not a silver bullet though. It won't magically fix that your chipset can
lock up if enough hardware goes bad enough. But it will usually save you from
bad blocks and the likes... Those are the errors you are _certain_ to meet at
some point.
> As far as I can ascertain there are 2 RAID packages.
> LVM and the raidtools package and patches. Which is
> better, which is more stable?
LVM can't do redundancy. If you need flexible storage, go for LVM, if you need
reliable storage go for RAID-1 or RAID-5. You can, I presume, build a LVM over
RAID-1/5 arrays, although I have *no* experience with LVM what so ever (yet).
--
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