On Nov 26, 2003, at 10:59 AM, <pctech@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Personal Choice: I would take hardware RAID over software RAID any three days of the week.
My caveat to the above, make sure what you buy is a true hardware RAID, not a pci card with multiple ide/scsi ports and software to drive the raid. I've seen this on promise cards *there are other brands that do the same* and on motherboards with promise chips. My simple test for this is that whatever the card/chipset, if it's a true hardware raid, it should not need any type of drivers for whatever os is installed. There may be utilities to monitor the raid from the operating system, but not to run the RAID.
If you have pci RAID card that's a software/hardware combo, I've had enough trouble with it, I'll go with linux software raid any day over the combo card any day.
As far as the reliability/speed/performance of Linux software raid, I was just discussing this with a fellow school system administrator, and he's been using software raid in a RAID 1 *mirroring* under linux for 1400 users on 400 client machines from a single server with dual p2/350's with scsi drives for several years. Performance is excellent and he's had a couple of hard drive failures that he's replaced and rebuilt the mirrors with no problems.
