FreeBSD 6.0 as storage server with raid5?

[Stijn Hoop]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 05:04:57PM -0700, secmgr wrote:
> Whatever you do, don't complain about it on this list, or you'll just be 
> told that if you really wanted raid, you should be running SCSI disks 
> and a raid adapter.  They may allow that 3ware does ok, but no ATA drive 
> should ever be relied on and even s/w raid on scsi is only for ignorant 
> lusers who are too cheap to do the "right thing".
> Those who think I run to hyperbole need only visit the archives.

I know what you mean but I think this write-up is a bit too harsh. As
long as the goal is to get _as reliable as possible_ without spending
too much money, I think software RAID has its niche.

Besides, I've seen a few hardware RAID controllers having issues
themselves (and they weren't the cheapest ones available either).

> One can only hope that gvinum actually works in 6 vs the buggy and 
> incomplete alpha code that shipped in 5.x.  Having a man page is nice, 
> but I'd rather have a raid 5 set that didn't panic the system and 
> corrupt the set when it lost a drive (and this with modern scsi drives 
> and adapter).

I haven't seen this (luckily!). I do know that sometime in 5.x there
was a RAID-5 bug in gvinum but then again the whole vinum/gvinum
transition was pretty dodgy back then. This is why I waited until 6.x
to migrate.

> I'd strongly suggest anyone using GEOM raid to do some 
> fault insertion testing of their setup prior to actually relying on it.

I did. It worked.

--Stijn

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