On Thursday 15 June 2006 17:40, Timothy Miller wrote: > > Hardware RAID is a mixed bag of performance and reliability. > Recently slashdot linked to an article where some hardware and > hardware-assisted RAID cards were compared. For the most part they > only talked about performance. I didn't read the whole thing, but I > didn't see mention of the reliability issue. And what I mean by that > is not the general RAID redundancy. I have friends who have had some > bad experiences with hardware RAID1 and RAID5 getting corrupted, > despite the disk redundancy. That is, the disks are fine, but > somehow, the data got messed up on the way there. Either they have > bugs, or they're susceptible to EM interference (which is a bug, > really). The on-board RAIDs seem to be the worst, with the add-on > cards being not generally a whole lot better.
There's another problem: what if the card breaks? You lose all your data, unless you can find a replacement card of the exact same type, or a different card that uses the exact same data format. An open, FPGA-based design could alleviate that problem: you just get a newer version, but load a different firmware that can read the old data from your disks. If the format is known, it could emulate all sorts of different legacy RAID cards as well. Lourens
pgpKGryinNsKt.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
