[TriLUG] How do you know when a RAID array is BROKE?

Rick DeNatale rick.denatale at gmail.com
Thu Mar 16 16:45:40 EST 2006


On 3/16/06, David Brain <dbrain at gmail.com> wrote:
> Been there - done that.  Have to say I'm something of a fan of
> software RAID unless there's a seriously good reason not to - much
> easier to recover from broken hardware with, easier to manage etc.  If
> software raid performance really is an issue for you (really), some
> sort of SAN solution would be preferable to multiple HW RAIDs (IMHO).

There's been some discussion the last few days about the merits of HW
vs SW raid on the Backuppc support mailing list.  It seems to be a not
quite religious issue, maybe not up to the level of vi vs. emacs.

Just how much performance penalty is there in SW raid?  My naive guess
would be that 1) it's probably not an issue for raid-1, where the
purpose is reduncancy, but might be more so for striped raid
configurations where the purpose is to achieve parallelism, and 2) the
SW raid implementation has probably gotten better over time such that
those who decided years ago that it was a performance problem are
cruising on an outdated notion.

--
Rick DeNatale

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