RAID options under Fedora

[Eric J. Feldhusen]

On Nov 26, 2003, at 10:59 AM, <pctech at mybellybutton.com> wrote:

> Personal Choice:  I would take hardware RAID over
> software RAID any three days of the week.

My caveat to the above, make sure what you buy is a true hardware RAID, 
not a pci card with multiple ide/scsi ports and software to drive the 
raid. I've seen this on promise cards *there are other brands that do 
the same* and on motherboards with promise chips.  My simple test for 
this is that whatever the card/chipset, if it's a true hardware raid, 
it should not need any type of drivers for whatever os is installed. 
There may be utilities to monitor the raid from the operating system, 
but not to run the RAID.

If you have pci RAID card that's a software/hardware combo, I've had 
enough trouble with it, I'll  go with linux software raid any day over 
the combo card any day.

As far as the reliability/speed/performance of Linux software raid, I 
was just discussing this with a fellow school system administrator, and 
he's been using software raid in a RAID 1 *mirroring* under linux for 
1400 users on 400 client machines from a single server with dual 
p2/350's with scsi drives for several years. Performance is excellent 
and he's had a couple of hard drive failures that he's replaced and 
rebuilt the mirrors with no problems.