Robin Laing wrote:
It depends on the hardware.
On Compaq Servers, the SmartRaid Controller has a significant advantage over software raid. If you loose a drive, it will rebuild the new drive transparently to the OS. The compaq controllers also have a commandline admin utility. When do a fresh install, you setup the arrays first, then install and no additional steps are required.
Most SATA raid controllers are not true hardware raid, most are standard SATA controllers with RAID in the BIOS, and it uses the systems cpu to do the RAID. 3Ware and a few other vendors make true hardware RAID SATA controllers that have their own processor to handle the raid on board, but as one would expect they cost more.
We use both hardware and software RAID at work for different projects. I have had drive failures on both types and the hardware RAID systems were easier to diagnose and fix {Hot Swap}, but both types recovered without loss of data.
In the last 10 years I have had to replace a number of drives on various operating system platforms, and running various operating systems. Linux and FreeBSD were both about the same and by far the best at recovering from partial or complete drive failures. I used a linux machine to make a forensic copy of a hard drive from a Windows XP machine that would not recover from a partial drive failure. I duped the copy to a new drive and then Windows XP was able to recover. Goes to show the flexability of linux over most other operating systems. I still have the 20GB image of the drive from the XP, and have mounted it with a loop device to grab a few files, that XP broke while 'repairing' it self.
Good luck.
Thanks for the info.
I have onboard SATA with RAID and I decided to use Software raid. Looks like I made the right choice. Asus MB with SI controller.
-- Robin Laing
