[NCSA-discuss] RAID recommendations?

[John Franklin]

I've had some professional experience with the Dell PERC RAID controllers, which are really rebadged MegaRAID controllers.  Overall, they've been solid and perform well.  

That said, there are a few issues I have with them, mostly in the administration side.  The RAID BIOS is useless for all but the most basic configuration tasks.  Resizing a RAID or doing any inspection of the RAID components requires using the MegaCLI, which is so finicky about is parameters and parameter order, and so poorly documented that you'll spend an hour on Google looking up what command options it expects and what the parameters mean.  A resize operation can take on the order of days to complete.

The rest of the time, the card is a solid performer, supporting multiple RAID containers and VMs with ease.  I haven't tried RAID 6 with it, but it is supported.  If I were to build out a RAID container with 2TB drives (which have a disturbingly high failure rate), I'd want the extra protection of RAID 6.

jf

On Dec 17, 2010, at 1:31 PM, Dan Singer wrote:

> Hello.  Wondering if anyone has any opinions on a RAID to buy -- or
> avoid.  We're thinking about getting a RAID in the 8-16 TB range for
> backup staging: backup to disk, copy to tape, leave the disk copy
> around for a while.  No need for snapshots or other fancy features,
> just capacity, speed, reliability, and ease of management are primary
> considerations; direct attached to a *nix server.
> 
> Just satisfied with your RAID?  Love it?  Hate it?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Dan
> 
> -- 
> Daniel E. Singer, System Administrator
> Dept. of Computer Science, Duke University
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