Let's be clear, that raid is *not* a backup solution. The purpose of
raid is to keep the system running in the event of a hard drive failure.
Sort of like a UPS does for power. You still need a backup / disaster
recovery solution above and beyond raid. I recommend off-site backups
(or archives if you prefer) with redundant drives there as well.
I do agree with Dan for the most part as he wrote before, however I
prefer a software raid implementation over hardware (as we've discussed
here recently). I think SW provides best reliability while HW provides
good reliability, and I'm apparently more frugal regarding expense.
While HW provides slightly better performance, I don't think the
improvement is worth the cost.
I'm a little confused why Dan rates HW as best reliability (previous
email) given the experiences he's had. ;) To be honest, I have very
little experience with HW raid, but I don't have any horror stories to
go along with it either.
On 05/16/2012 08:34 AM, Dan McAllister wrote:
I used to be a fan of ADAPTEC RAID, but TWICE I had an issue where a
RAID1 mirror recovered from the wrong disk, thus erasing TONS of data
that had to be recovered from backups (archives, to be more
language-correct). In both cases, ADAPTEC admitted that it was a flaw in
their firmware that re-numbered the disks without warning. (Admittedly,
both were issues where the hot-swap capability was not available, and so
the RAID card was booting cold with 2 drives and had to determine which
was the "good" drive -- not the most optimal method of recovering a
RAID-1 array!)
Back in the early 2000's, I had good success with Promise TX-1000's (for
IDE-based RAID1) -- but that is a "Fake-RAID" product, and while stable
in RedHat 5-9, it became less so in the RHEL era. I dumped Promise when
they reported that they had no plans to write drivers for the 2.6 kernel.
So, I switched to 3ware (now LSI) -- and I couldn't be happier! They
have given me a product (both the 9550 [PCI-X] and 9650se [PCI-E] lines]
that has performed FLAWLESSLY for me for both Windows AND Linux servers.
When (not IF) a drive fails, I can hot-swap in a new one -- even from a
different manufacturer -- and it rebuilds the RAID 1 (or RAID-10) array
without interference or input at all -- just plug and play!
I have also started to use the 9750 [also PCI-E, but 6Gbps SATA/SAS],
but I honestly don't have any experience with this card in a failure
mode, so I'm not in a position to review it.
My lowest-end servers use Linux md-RAID, and as with the 9750, I just
don't have enough failure experience to judge it....
Just my thoughts -- you know I like to share them! :-)
Dan
On 5/16/2012 11:16 AM, Maxwell Smart wrote:
I never did alot with RAIDs, but all were hardware and not one ever
worked as advertised for recovery. I prefer a solid mirrored backup.
To each his own.
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