Hardware RAID

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stijn Hoop [mailto:stijn at win.tue.nl]
> Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 1:02 AM
> To: Sandy Rutherford; tedm at toybox.placo.com
> Cc: FreeBSD Questions
> Subject: Re: Hardware RAID
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 05:22:36AM -0800, Sandy Rutherford wrote:
> > >>>>> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 22:57:21 -0800,
> > >>>>> "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com> said:
> >
> >  >   This did teach me a lesson that I kind of knew already but
> >  > didn't think too much about.  That is, a software array
> is no substitute
> >  > for a hardware array.  ...
>
> I respectfully disagree here; it is a substitute in some respects,
> especially if you factor in cost.
>

I think you didn't read my post, I explicitly stated vinum is a great
thing
if what your wanting to do is use a bunch of cheap disks and
cheap controller cards to either get a giant partition, or to
stripe them together and get faster access.

In other words cost is the only justification for selecting software
raid over hardware raid.  You haven't really made the case that vinum
is better than a hardware array card on any other issue except cost.

> My vinum volumes allowed me to survive for a long time without backups
> (bad idea, don't do that), and for the past years have allowed me to
> survive without having to restore my backups. This through about 5
> failing ATA disks and multiple upgrades of the storage space.
>
> I'd say it was worth it for me, including reliability.
>
> If you need speed, or have the cash, etc, you can go for hardware
> RAID.  But even there I've seen and heard horror stories of
> incompatible disks, spontaneously lost configurations or even worse,
> silent data corruption due to a bad disk.
>

I didn't say these things couldn't happen on a hardware array.  I
said that when these things do happen, it's worse for a software
array than a hardware array, and that they happen a lot more on a
software array.

Ted