> Software Raid != Hot Swap

Actually I have figured out how to do a warm swap with out rebooting on a
software SATA RAID.

Here's the steps:

1) mark drive in failure in RAID device
2) remove drive from scsi bus ie /proc/scsi/scsi
3) add new physical drive
4) partition drive
5) add new drive to /proc/scsi/scsi
6) add new drive to RAID device

Depending on the controller steps 2 and 5 could be removed.  Current SATA
controllers from Intel, etc., do not provide enough information to allow
this according to the SATA kernel maintainer.

Step 4 can be removed by pre-partitioning the drive.  I have one back up
drive, and have partitioned it and read to go.

I feel confident that I can recover from a failure.  I think given time
and better SATA controllers software RAIDs will approach the ease of use
of hardware.  Performance might be another issue.

I believe that 3ware controllers are easier out of the box, but software
RAID can provide a good level of reliability.

In some ways I'm kind of glad the 3ware card didn't work with the
supermicro.  Gave me a good excuse to learn about SATA and software RAIDs.

BTW, here a good source of info on the status of SATA in the kernel:

http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/topics/Serial_ATA.html

--
Christopher Baus
http://www.baus.net/
Tahoe, Wine, and Linux.




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