Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Would that I had the money to and still get the space I need. Even
doing 2 12 disk RAID6 sets (each with a hot spare) gets you 9TB which
is 50% more space for the same money as RAID10.
You are omitting the cost of the raid controller here. For your 12+
ports you don't have much other choice except a dedicated network
device. For the size
What do you mean by a dedicated network device -- do you mean a NAS?
Not true. See, e.g.,
<http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i10219/amd-storage-server.php>.
that normal people need - or that you might use on other machines, you
might
Are you implying I'm not normal? ;)
9 TB in one box seems a little extreme. My storage is a little more
distributed.
have the option of running raid10 (or 0 + LVM) in software on the
motherboard ports plus some dumb $20/port cards and buying several
extra drives.
On that note, what cheap add-in SATA controllers have folks had good
luck with? I haven't tried *too* hard, but the couple I've tried were
far less than stable.
I have a 4-port promise SATA card that seems OK but I haven't really
used it that much.
There is one advantage of hardware RAID that hasn't been mentioned yet,
and that's hot-swap. Last time I tried, software RAID fell over when a
HDD suddenly disappeared.
I've had very good luck with hot-swap scsi drives with software raid.
One box last booted in mid-2003 has had a couple of drives replaced and
re-synced with no interruption in service. (An IBM netfinity running RH
7.3 if anyone cares).
With parallel IDE a drive failure has a fair chance of locking up the
controller and any other drive on the same cable but SATA shouldn't have
that problem.
As a counterpoint, with software raid you can mirror to about anything
of the same size, not just something in the same box from the same
vendor. As an example, I have one server with a pair of internal IDE
drives mirrored with a third 'missing' member and can connect an
external firewire drive, sync it in, then remove it without shutting
down. You could also mirror to iscsi partitions on another machine if
you wanted.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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