On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 12:37 PM Kihaguru Gathura <kihagurugath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is hardware RAID on Poweredge servers (T340, PERC H330 in particular) > generally stable enough for production or is it safer to stick with OpenBSD > softraid? > I haven't used the H330, but the PERC 5/i and the PERC H700 have worked fine for me. In terms of 'safety' I advise having a spare controller on hand because if your controller fails recovery will be simplest if you have the same controller (with the same firmware version) on hand. Note that mounting a RAID volume on a newer controller (or the same controller with newer firmware) may prevent that volume from being attached to an older controller later. So don't try doing fancy things like moving the drives to a newer system to take a backup, then trying to move them back to their original system later unless you have the same controller in both systems. In general I prefer hardware RAID because it's more likely you'll be able to easily boot your system if the array is running in a degraded state due to a drive failure (perhaps you might need to press F1 or something to continue). With softraid, you might need to type special commands at the console to force booting or mounting a volume with a failed drive in it. This may be a problem if you are in a rush to bring the system back up and don't have a convenient way to look up the necessary commands. -ken
