Put your Pro's and Con's for SoftwareRaid vs HardwareRaid here.

One persons opinion

<yem> gotta rebuild this mail server and i have now sworn off kernelraid <jsr> Ah, then ebay have some 2-channel units for, like, US$50 <Remosi> why? <yem> Remosi: its nice if you don't want to spend any money. but it can be a pain to sort out the lilo issues if you have to replace a drive or shift the drives to another box <Remosi> ahh excellent point

• Remosi goes and wiki's the answer

<yem> the existing mailserver has hda and hdc in raid1. when i move those drives to another box (same channels, etc) it wont boot <Remosi> hmm <Remosi> I wonder why <yem> yeah <yem> nice while it works.. <Remosi> yah <yem> one server here is going on 18 months old on kernelraid <yem> it has kept the system up under disc failure at least once

GlennRamsey's opinion:

On my home office box the backups have become too large for writing to CDRWs so I installed a second hard drive and faubackup. Faubackup runs as a daily (ana)cron job and this works OK except that when doing the backup the machine becomes sluggish. Hence I'm thinking about using RAID 1 instead. Browsing through the HOWTO's and docs on the web its seems that software RAID is a bit tricky to set up and is something that you should only do if you know exactly what you are doing. Given that a RAID card is quite cheap now it would seem that software RAID is a poor choice for the user who has better things to do than wrestle with the configuration of software RAID.

GerwinVanDeSteeg's opinion:

Finding the correct RAID card for your distribution can also be tricky. Software RAID is not too difficult to manage depending on your choice of distribution. Some of the more "user friendly" distros (Read RedHat, Fedora) come with an install process capable of installing the machine on a SoftwareRaid ensuring there is no fuss whatsoever. I've setup many systems with SoftwareRaid and HardwareRaid and found that if you've got the wrong card or driver things don't always work the way you want.