Greg wrote: > On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 10:56, Chris Mauritz wrote: > > However, it is not really that simple, especially when you lose a > > disk or if you have to upgrade your kernel or if you want to run > > a recent vintage kernel, etc. A hardware controller is substantially > > more easy to setup and manage. If you have the time to spend or as > > much knowledge of the subject as Jakob, then the software RAID > > implementation can yield very good results too. > > Actually, no... A very competent friend was replacing a machine > recently. For the new machine, he purchased a hardware RAID controller > (I forget which one), "in order to simplify things". He spent about 10 > hours trying to make it work, finally gave up, and used software RAID, > and had the system going 45 minutes later. While there are good > arguments for using hardware RAID, I don't believe that simplicity is > one of them. (Speed, however, can be. Stupid raid5d takes up about 25% > of my processors, but only when the system is under load, bleah). I suppose there is an exception to everything. However, I don't think your friend's experience was typical. Software RAID can be "easy" if you let something like Redhat's anaconda do all the dirty work and then you don't fiddle with the system. However, when you need to do anything to the kernel or if you have problems with a disk or conflicting versions of software/kernel, it can be a complete pain in the ass (I have been using Linux software RAID since 1997 or so). My experience has been that RAID frequently gets broken as the kernel matures so you have to be extremely careful about updating things. In contrast, my RAID installs onto 3ware and Mylex hardware RAID cards have been relatively uneventful, even when drives have failed down the road. Again, if you're comfortable fondling the kernel and keep up to date with the raid/kernel mailing lists, you can indeed get a nice/fast implementation of software RAID. With the advent of reliable IDE RAID cards and dirt cheap IDE disks, I haven't felt the need to go to all that effort in quite some time. Cheers, C -- Chris Mauritz ritz@mordor.net - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
