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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Thought I should put in a plug for
software RAID. Depending on your budget, software RAID can offer a
compelling alternative.<br>
<br>
The biggest advantage as I see it is future-proofing. In the event
of a catastrophic failure with your hardware, the drives in a
software RAID can be easily pulled and spun up on another machine,
without any loss of data (assuming no damage to the drives
themselves). This cannot always be said about hardware RAID, where
even RAID controllers from the same manufacturer are not
guaranteed to be able to rebuild an existing array from another
controller.<br>
<br>
Software RAID doesn't even care about architecture; I regularly
pull the drives from my ARM based NAS and mount the array on my
PC.<br>
<br>
At the lower end of town, the performance difference between
software and hardware RAID is negligible. Unless your controller
card has a large amount of cache (which means it also needs
on-board battery backup), you're unlikely to see any great
performance benefit.<br>
<br>
Lastly, software is incredibly flexible. Extra drives can be
easily added to an existing array, including changing the RAID
layout. Coupled with LVM, software RAID provides a very powerful
drive management system. Infact, if managed carefully, many RAID
manipulations such as growing an array or replacing drives can be
performed online, without taking either the filesystem, array or
even the server offline. The same can rarely be said about
hardware RAID.<br>
<br>
My one piece of advice for hardware RAID is, whatever you get, buy
two. Put one in the cupboard for when your controller inevitably
dies and you scream in desperation as your precious data
disappears in a mess of blocks.<br>
<br>
(This also ignores all the interesting things which can be done
with modern filesystems, such as ZFS and BTRFS, which implement
many RAID-like features).<br>
<br>
Adrian<br>
<br>
On 23/10/12 09:40, Paul Dean wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:20121023094046.00f7d5f6@slab3.inthecave.ws"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hi Andrew,
I just got a HP DL385 G2 with a P400 Raid card in it.
Whacked Wheezy on it, and grabbed the debs from HP repo, and loaded the cciss modules from stock kernel, hey presto all good.
A little weird how it lists the drives, like old unix days, but it runs smooth and fast.
iLO monitoring and extras run well, all round a good server.
--
Thanks
Paul Dean.
"Life is not WHAT you make it, it's WHO you have in it..."
On Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:57:54 +0800
Andrew Furey <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:andrew.furey@gmail.com"><andrew.furey@gmail.com></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 22 October 2012 18:42, Geoffrey Richards <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:Geoff@79.com.au"><Geoff@79.com.au></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Does anybody have any recommendations for a Debian based server supporting a
hardware raid?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">[snip]
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">HP ML150 G6 witha smart array p410
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
You shouldn't have any issues with that, although you may need to add
"nomodeset" to your boot options (we do on the DL380s these days).
Andrew
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
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