On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, George Vieira wrote:
> I would like to know what people have had experiences with RAID levels
> either software or hardware RAID. I would prefer hardware RAID and possibly
> have to look around for supported cards under linux but was wanting to know
> who has a hardware raid currently running and what good features people have
> found with them...or bad if any...
Serious hardware RAID is major league expensive. "Serious" hardware raid
is defined as being able to hot swap, have online spares, have high
capacity external storage units etc. Almost all of it is SCSI, and some is
Linux supported {Compaq SmartArray controllers, Mylex DAC controllers from
memory are both in the kernel with support}.
Having said that, there's a perfectly acceptable IDE RAID card which
EverythingLinux sells which is perfectly Linux supported, and which works
pretty well.
There's always software RAID, but you pay a performance overhead. I'm not
sure if Linux's RAID drivers do true RAID 5 - but they at least do RAID
0/1, which is good enough for most application requirements.
On the whole, RAID is almost a must have for serious, missionc ritical
application or fileservers. Even regular backups can;t provide the data
recovery ability of a properly configured RAID setup.
DaZZa
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