Differences between current version and predecessor to the previous major change of SoftwareRaidVsHardwareRaid.
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| Newer page: | version 13 | Last edited on Friday, May 15, 2009 8:07:03 am | by AlPyat | |
| Older page: | version 10 | Last edited on Wednesday, July 13, 2005 1:30:57 pm | by DanielLawson | Revert |
@@ -51,8 +51,19 @@
As of Jun 2005, there are basically no "true" two port hardware IDE/SATA raid solutions. The only cards that fit this bill are the 3ware 7006-2 PATA adapter (old), and 8006-2 SATA adapter. If you want two channel RAID 0 or RAID 1, you have to get a so-called fakeraid card. These rely on software (in the form of a kernel module) to perform the RAID. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html has some good information on the state of SATA RAID, in particular looking at linux support.
[3ware|http://www.3ware.com] still seems to be the preferred vendor for PCI based hardware SATA raid, although [Areca|http://www.areca.com.tw] has some interesting offerings.
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+LawrenceDoliveiro's opinion:
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+Out of half a dozen client machines I've dealt with, with different RAID controllers in them, not one has been an entirely trouble-free experience. The best was a Dell with a PERC 3/Di controller (supported by the aacraid Linux module). Dell provided a utility called afacli, which allowed you to examine the health of the array, reconfigure disks etc. Another Dell with a PERC 4/Di controller (supported by the megaraid Linux module) has been working, but as far as I know there is no good management utility comparable to afacli. An older machine with a Promise FastTrak TX2000 controller gave us some interesting trouble: SuSE Linux stopped including support for this controller, but I was able to download "partial" sources from the Promise Website and build them for an updated kernel. This seemed to work at first, but then it would crash every few days.
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+Conclusion: stick to software RAID. It works the same on all hardware configurations and all Linux distros. The mdadm(8) utility is powerful and includes a range of functions for monitoring the health of your array, reconfiguring disks and so on. __You have no redundancy in RAID if you can't tell whether your disks are OK or not.__
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+Oh yes, and there's also [this reason|http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#38].
See also: [Software], [Hardware], RaidOnLinux
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+!!Resources:
+* [RAID Center - RAID Calculator, Raid Tools and Comparison Charts|http://www.icc-usa.com/store/pc/viewContent.asp?idpage=7]
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Part of CategorySystemAdministration
