On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 8:10 AM, James M. Pulver <jmp...@cornell.edu> wrote: > I would point out that I'm not sure I've ever really seen the benefit of > "Real Raid" except for the vendor making more money. The only place I've > used it is in iSCSI boxes that run everything in firmware.
The ability to properly RAID the boot partition, with "/boot" on it, has been a big deal. In the way back when days of LILO, it was handled by writing the very small boot loader to both disks of a RAID 1 array, but could be a flipping nightmare with RAID 5 allocating and remembering to allocate and write it to *every individual disk*. And with grub, it's gotten more complex for Linux releases and RAID systems that can't ensure that /boot/grub is on all the relevant disks. It's been worth the tradeoffs for the flexibility, but there are still features I miss from LILO. Cleaning up after a mess like "the first disk got a screwed up boot loader from disk failure or keyboard error" can be pretty expensive in downtime, and engineering time and arranging remote hands-on support in places where you didn't think you needed it "because you've got RAID, and that protects you from disk failures". > On all computers / servers, I've always used MDADM on Linux and ZFS on > FreeNAS. Both have been excellent for my intended use, though FreeNAS is only > at home for ~3 concurrent users, so take that whole thing with a grain of > salt. Neither has lost data due to power outages or drive failures. Have you worked out how to handle "/boot" other than to ignore it, the way most people setting up software RAID do?
