[K12OSN] Woe is me: Onboard SCSI/RAID Controller

Les Mikesell les at futuresource.com
Tue Oct 12 23:13:40 UTC 2004


On Tue, 2004-10-12 at 17:15, Mario Guerra wrote:

> I understand why software modems exist. But software RAID?. It's exceedingly 
> ridiculous. If you need RAID you need speed and reliability. In fact, I've 
> witnessed HP RAID-over-IDE implementation. How absurd a concept.

You don't lose anything in speed or reliability if you do software
RAID1 (full mirroring) on SCSI drives.  They will do the writes
in parallel and only one read.  You trade off the cost of the disk
space against a more expensive controller, but with the software
version you can fairly easily clone a machine from half of its
drives or recover data from a drive without needing a matching
expensive controller.  And you don't always need speed from a RAID.
I use one for on-line backups where one drive is an internal IDE
and the mirror is an external firewire drive that is periodically
swapped for offsite storage. It's still faster than anything you
could do with tapes.

---
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com





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