RAID and Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 08:38:08PM -0500, Andrej Marjan wrote:
> 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. 

You can move them to any other controller you want in any machine.

> 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.

I wouldn't buy Dell that's for sure.  I recently helped someone out that
was running a lot of Dell servers, and one stopped working (it appeared
like it would power on, but most of the time nothing would appear on the
screen, while other times you would see the bios but then it would turn
itself off.  Letting it cool off for 20 minutes would get the bios to
appear again for a minute or so before it would go back to just staying
blank).  The guess was that the power supply had gone, and of course the
windows server install didn't want to boot on any other machine with
different hardware, and calling Dell gave an answer of "We will let you
know in 5 hours if we even have any spare parts for that model and if we
do it will be 7 to 10 days to get them to you".  I solved the problem
with a google search and finding a used identical machine (well except
for having a second cpu and twice the ram and 6 73GB scsi disks in it)
in kitchener, then went and got it and we put the disks in that and got
things back up.  So much for service.  And yet the other guy working on
the problem (had been for about a week when I got there) said Dell had
the best service out of all the big brand names.  I don't think I want
to buy a server from any of the name brand companies.

Never mind the number of Dell laptops I have seen where the battery
charging circuit has died near the end (or just after) the warrenty
period.

--
Len Sorensen
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