raid controller

[Ryan Sanders]

> I will second what Lennart wrote and can cite first-hand experience 
> with the problem of using hardware RAID. I have a couple of servers 
> that use the MegaRAID controller. MegaRAID is not exactly uncommon. I 
> had Linux running on both of those machines at one time or another, 
> one a Dell, the other an HP, both fully supporting the drives that 
> were created by the hardware controller. They were both long overdue 
> for a refresh so rather than do an upgrade and preserve the same disk 
> formatting, I wanted to do a fresh installation with LVM so that I 
> could have some flexibility. No matter which distro I tried, no 
> current version would detect the drives created by the hardware RAID 
> controller. It turns out there was a change in the megaraid module 
> after the 2.6.9 version of the kernel. The same module no longer 
> supports the older hardware. So, I blew away the hardware RAID sets, 
> disabled the RAID controllers completely, and used Linux software 
> RAID and LVM. Software RAID is not likely to change to the point 
> where you will not be able to see the drives that were created by 
> older versions whereas apparently, hardware RAID support can change 
> for the worse over time.

If you are really worried about data loss, the best answer is to  is to 
back up your data first / perform regular backups ;)

Ryan
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml