[NBLUG/talk] RAID?

Lincoln Peters anfrind at gmail.com
Mon Dec 31 10:17:29 PST 2007


On Dec 31, 2007 8:39 AM, Kyle Rankin <kyle at nblug.org> wrote:
> Most of the on-board RAID you will see in consumer motherboards aren't
> actual "hardware" RAID because they require the OS to have driver support
> to see the array. In my opinion it's better to use Linux software RAID as
> it's more stable, has more features, and you can migrate to new hardware
> much more easily.

One good example of how Linux software RAID has more features than
hardware RAID: once, I created a pair of RAID arrays out of a pair of
300GB hard drives (one PATA, one SATA) and a 250GB PATA hard drive.  I
had a 50GB RAID-1 array spread over the two 300GB drives for my root
filesystem, a 249GB RAID-5 array spread over all three drives for my
home directory, and I used the remaining total ~3GB as swap space.
And it performed flawlessly!

The only time I ever had any problems was when one drive developed bad
sectors in the swap partition, but as soon as I realized what was
going on I deactivated that swap partition and the computer continued
to run flawlessly while I waited for the replacement to arrive (I
couldn't use RAID-5 on the swap partitions because they weren't
exactly the same size).

Not surprisingly, I have never seen a hardware RAID implementation
that could do something that exotic.  My only complaint was that I
couldn't increase the size of the RAID-5 array by adding more drives
without rebuilding the entire array, but that seems to be a pretty
rare feature for any RAID implementation.


-- 
Lincoln Peters
<anfrind at gmail.com>



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