[K12OSN] RAID let me down...

[Les Mikesell]

Jim McQuillan wrote:

> Which hardware raid were you using?
> 
> I've been using 3Ware SATA raid, and it's been working great.  I managed 
> to pick a lousy batch of harddrives, and I've lost a few of them, and 
> each time, I just pop out the old drive, plug in the new one, and it 
> never misses a beat.
> 
> Software raid will never give you that nice hot-swap capability.

Sure it does if the hardware supports it.  I've swapped out several 
broken SCA (SCSI with the hot-swap connector) drives that were in RAID1 
software mirrors without shutting down, and I have a couple of 
partitions built as RAID1 with a member 'missing' that I periodically 
mirror to an external firewire drive that is then rotated offsite.   I 
don't think I'd do RAID5 in software these days though.  For smaller 
storage you don't save enough over RAID1 to be worth the extra CPU use 
and losing the ability to recover data from any single remaining drive 
and for larger storage you'd want to do it in hardware.


-- 
   Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com