begin quoting kelsey hudson as of Sun, Dec 16, 2007 at 02:22:23PM -0800: > 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.
You have to be very, very, very careful in your selection of devices. Most of the "hardware RAID" devices out there don't seem to allow this; although there's a ton more out there today then there was when I was deciding between hardware RAID, software RAID, or none. > Aside from that, requiring drivers for hardware, especially hardware > raid controllers, is a fact of life. Wrong attitude. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. When they start providing custom controllers for monitors, will you just accept that as a "fact of life"? How about when Seagate starts shipping proprietary drivers to access its cheap 1TB disks, sorry, only works with MSVista or Linux 2.4 kernels with *this* binary blob driver? Facts of life are constraints imposed by the universe. Everything else is up for challenge. > 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. The increasing prevalence of hardware RAID that looks like Just Another Disk is very promising. I'll grant that the additional administrative functions are nice, but there are times when dealing with the required additional drivers imposes too much overhead. (What if I want to run Minix? Whoops, sucks to be me, no RAID, suck it up, run MSVista and VirtualPC?) -- The facts of life were "You gotta run MSWindows". I didn't listen. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
