Nice looking 'disk array'

[Byron Sonne]

Madison... fix your posting! You don't need to quote everything just to
leave 2 lines of new text at the bottom ;)

This goes for the rest of you too!

http://www.river.com/users/share/etiquette/

Madison Kelly wrote:
> Dave Bour wrote:
>> I was a user of Adaptec 2410 cards...note the past tense.  It's
>> supposedly a true hardware raid contoller.  Problems were, I'd get a
>> failure on at least one of them (2 on board) at least every 3 months. 
>> 1/2 the time, it meant the loss of the array.  I finally gave up and
>> switched to dumb promise cards...on soft raid.
>>
>> The problems included complete lack of support from Adaptec,
>> overheating issues, slow rebuilds (1.5tb array took about 1 week to
>> complete), and incompatibility between different firmwares on the
>> cards, meaning I couldn't even card swap in case of a failure. 
>> So now, it's soft raid for me.  Crazy part, in light of this thread,
>> is that swap (to soft raid) happened about 2 months ago with my first
>> soft raid failure this weekend.  I got an email that it happened.   It
>> brought the spare drive into play and in 3 hours, was finished the
>> rebuild.  I shut the box down this morning, swapped out a drive and
>> brought it back up, new spare drive online in 10min after that. 
>> Single boot.  I could never do it that easy on the hardware raid cards.
>>
>> I'm sold on soft raid now.  And I'm not locked into anyone's propriety
>> firmware, formats, etc.  And I can easily expand beyond the 4 + 1 hot
>> spare now too, which may be happening soon too.  My only wish is that
>> I'd done raid 6 instead of 5 reducing the risk of a controller
>> failure, but maybe that's a project for this summer...
>>
>> My $0.02.
>> Dave
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org [mailto:owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of
>> Madison Kelly
>> Sent: Monday, January 29, 2007 2:05 PM
>> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
>> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Nice looking 'disk array'
>>
>> Byron Sonne wrote:
>>> IMO, hardware raid is a better performer and more reliable. When it's
>>> hardware that's where the real advantages come in.
>>
>> I feel that depends on the controller and hardware. I've seen so many
>> "hardware" RAID controllers, which in reality are little more than the
>> equivalent of winmodems, fail. Then unless you have a spare
>> controller, you are SOL. In the cases where the alternative is low-end
>> RAID hardware like that, I always recommend using software arrays. At
>> least then the array is not tied to the hardware.
>>
>> Now, if you get a controller with a dedicated processor then you are
>> in business. Generally those controllers have (at least) a dedicated
>> MIPS CPU for handling XOR calculations (specially important in a failed
>> state) with it's own dedicated RAM for caching and often even have
>> their own battery backup on-board to maintain unwritten data in case
>> of a power failure. On DB systems, this is specially important.
>>
>> http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/sas_cards/performance/SAS-4800/
>>
>> Look like it's inline with what I am talking about (though I couldn't
>> see specs on it's proc, but it's priced in the range to have one).
>>
>> My $0.02 :)
>>
>> Madi
> 
> Good to know that about Adaptec. In the past, when I wasn't using the
> Compaq/Proliant controllers I would use Mylex, which was owned by IBM
> for a while but now by LSI (iirc).
> 
> *sigh*
> 
> Good hardware is a dieing breed in the face of commodity pressures. A
> sad state.
> 
> Madi
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