Francesco Trentini wrote: > Due to the imminent new board 6501, and the presence of two SATA > interfaces, this will surely be a very welcomed addition allowing to > create a simple mirrored bootable array of two disks.
I don't see a great need for this. RAID1 (and btw. RAID0, a.k.a. striping) are easy to do in software, and most operating systems that one would probably run on a Soekris have decent to good support for it. The real issue with the quality of a RAID implementation is anyhow in storage management, error handling, convenient sparing and reconstruction (preferably online), and interfacing to service. For all of that, a hardware RAID chip per se doesn't help, without strong OS support. RAID 5 (and other erasure-code based RAIDs) are a different story; there the tradeoff between a hardware (or hardware-assisted) implementation and an OS-based implementation is different, in particular on machines with little CPU power and memory. But with only two disk interfaces, there is no need to discuss this. Side remark (mostly addressed to Soren): I'm delighted to see that the new model comes with much more memory than the 5501. If you connect two disk drives to a small server (I have two TB-class SATA drives), and try to run software RAID, large file systems, and a high-capacity (but low-performance low-power) file server, then the lack of memory is really the constraining factor. This is particularly true for those OS'es (such as OpenBSD) that need lots of memory to fsck a large file system. That's why I will defer buying my next Soekris until the 2GB model is available, but then get one right away. -- Ralph Becker-Szendy [email protected] 408-395-1435 735 Sunset Ridge Road, Los Gatos, CA 95033 _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
