SJS wrote:
You can't yank an IDE/SCSI/FC drive out and drop a hardware RAID in. You just get hardware acceleration for what is basically a software RAID...
Actually, you can. There are a myriad of products out there that do just this: attach a bunch of disks under SCSI/FC/SATA/SAS/etc. and do all the RAID for you. You insert disks into the box, then attach the box to your storage backend. It takes one port on your controller. The box into which you insert your disks does all the RAID and provides to the SCSI bus a single (or multiple) disk(s) (read: a single SCSI target/ID with multiple LUNs) that actually consist of many disks put together.
Aside from that, requiring drivers for hardware, especially hardware raid controllers, is a fact of life. I currently have machines with mixes of hardware and software raid. Originally I had to do some hacking to get the driver into my installer kernel, but it didn't take very long. Now, I'm *much* happier with the speed and flexibility of the hardware solutions than the software solutions (as a whole). Of course, there are caveats to each, and each has its place, but for my use? hardware raid fits the ticket much better than software.
-kelsey -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
