RAID and Linux

[Andrej Marjan]

On January 31, 2008 12:26:13 pm Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> Well if you use hardware raid then it isn't up to linux to support
> adding to the existing raid, it depends on the raid controller.  Some
> support expanding a raid5, some do not.  The only one I have worked with
> was an ibm serveraid which certainly did support expanding the raid with
> extra drives later.  I used that feature a few times.  Personally I
> would rather use linux software raid since the performance for raid1
> certainly dropped significantly moving from linux software raid to the
> ibm serveraid 4m with the same disks.

Indeed, and there's also the question of reliability. With software raid, 
there's no controller to fail and possibly render your disks useless if you 
can't find a replacement. 

I'm particularly gun-shy about Dells -- my employer had an all-Dell contract a 
few years back and we suffered through frequent RAID failures. Actually, the 
whole server line seem to have been lemons, and the admins became afraid to 
reboot the servers because they never knew if a reboot would succeed.
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