Anybody have any experience with RAID controllers under Fedora?

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Jeremy Brown <jeremy at cadre5.com> said:
> Benjamin Arai wrote:
> >Has anybody had any good experiences with RAID controllers under 
> >Fedora?  If so, which card and what happened.
> >
> A little OT, but I wholeheartedly recommend looking into Linux software 
> RAID, which delivers performance almost equal to that of most hardware 
> RAID controllers...and often a higher level of stability.

I have several servers with AMI/LSI MegaRAID cards, and they are very
good.  You can download a "megamgr" program from LSI's website that will
let you manage the RAID arrays while the system is up (I have replaced a
failed drive and rebuilt an array without the system ever going down).

I have servers with software RAID and servers with hardware RAID.  If
you are looking for data reliability, software RAID is fine.  If you are
looking for server reliability, go with hardware RAID.

What I mean is this: data reliability is when you don't lose data
because of a disk failure.  The system may go down, or you may have to
take it down to replace the failed disk, but you don't lose any data.
Server reliability is when the system needs to be up and running 24x7;
when a disk fails, you just want to know about it so you can install a
replacement without the server ever going off-line.

If you combine hardware RAID with LVM (and online filesystem resize
patches), you can upgrade disk systems and increase storage space
without ever shutting down or unmounting a filesystem.  I've done this
several times under HP Tru64 Unix (with external storage array systems
and Tru64's AdvFS filesystem).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.