I've got to say, I agree with everything said here.
I started out with RAID5 on a proper hardware adaptec raid card, and it was a bit flakey and Linux support wasn't great. I moved to mdadm and sold the card (which gave me the cash for some bigger drives) and it's been rock solid. I moved the server from Debian to Ubuntu and have had 3 motherboard upgrades since I started. The array has just moved across with no hastle (it's used as a data drive, I have the system on another disk)
Matt
-----Original Message----- From: main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Mark Rogers Sent: 30 June 2011 09:06 To: main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] Motherboard software RAID vs Linux FakeRAID
On 29/06/11 20:53, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Were you considering RAID 0 or RAID 1 here ?
RAID1
I'd say there is almost no contest there. Unless we are talking Enterprise
quality SAS RAID on large arrays then there is little reason to bother
with
hardware assisted RAID. Particularly when we are talking about just 2
drives.
You're not one to sit on the fence are you, Wayne? :-)
For some chipsets there are linux management tools but you still generally
get worse performance than md arrays are capable of on decent hardware.
Also
you are bound to your hardware so if say the mainboard of your server
fails
then you aren't going to be able to mount the disks until you source
another
with the same chipset *
This has been my argument in the past so I'm glad it's backed up by someone more knowledgeable!
Assuming that you have somewhere to store the data whilst you are repartitioning then I'd say very high.
I was thinking of the second disk :-)
At the moment I'm using the "hardware" RAID. I should be able to remove one disk from the array and still boot from the other, then create a new degraded md array with the second disk, copy everything across, boot from the md array, add the second first disk to the array.
That sounds fine in theory but there are several stumbling blocks in practice due to my lack of knowledge, which lead me towards a fresh install, which isn't a great way to learn! (At present there's very little on the box other
than a fresh install so if wiping it is the way to go that's what I'll do.)