Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 4:18:11 PM, Mark Rogers wrote: > Martin Nix wrote: >> Software RAID does not scale too well I'm afraid (in my experience)
It depends what you mean by 'scale'. I've got some huge software RAID setups in terms of RAID device size (I realise this may not be what you meant). > It depends what the application is. Software RAID via Linux in my > experience is better than fake RAID as implemented on cheap RAID cards. Absolutely, not least because the driver support under linux for these 'fakeraid' controllers can be very iffy. > Pay a couple of hundred quid for a half-decent card and of-course that's > better. But you can pick up a server for around £150 these days, and add > 4-off 500GB drives for another £200. At that level almost doubling the > cost to add a decent hardware RAID card to the equation makes little > sense (albeit more sense than doubling the cost to stick Windows server > onto it!) You don't even need to pay a couple of hundred. There are very good 2 port cards starting at less than £100 for full hardware RAID (though you'll be looking at ~150+ for 4 ports and RAID5), 3ware and Areca immediately come to mind. Of course, as you point out, if you're buying a server for £150 then it seems rather pointless in spending that again on a RAID card. But in my experience you would never really be buying such a cheap server with the intention of putting h/w RAID in it, since there's a reason you only wanted a £150 box in the first place :) -- Best regards, Andy _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
