SATA RAID: Adaptec 1420SA, Promise TX4300?

[George Hartzell]

Daniel O'Connor writes:
 > On Sunday 02 April 2006 17:48, Matthias Andree wrote:
 > > > You can't boot off a system with a dead primary disk with software RAID1.
 > > > (well you MIGHT but.. in any case RAID1 cards are quite cheap)
 > >
 > > It's a matter of the BIOS:
 > > will it complain, or will it proceed to the next SATA disk?
 > 
 > Yes indeed.
 > It also depends on the failure mode of the disk.
 > 
 > Personally I think the price is worth paying :)
 > (Although for a home server you can get your hands on easily then software 
 > RAID should not be a problem)

One of the advantages that purely software raid (e.g. gmirror) has
over "hardware" raid (faux or genuine) is that in an emergency I can
take one or both of my gmirror'ed disks and put them in just about any
system that I can come up with and they'll work.

With raid systems that use proprietary metadata I'd need to find a
similar controller to hook them up to.

I think that this is one of those Darned Engineering Tradeoffs, but
I'd rather have the flexibility in assembling hardware than having the
raid be able to boot w/out intervention w/ a dead disk.

g.