Re: hardware raid vs. software raid

On Thursday, 30.11.2006 at 16:56 +0100, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:

On 30.11.06 15:44, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Preparing to buy a new server...

What is debian's opinion about hardware/software raid?

I have the feeling that software raid 1 is more reliable since if
anything goes wrong with the hardware, I could just take one or two
disks out of the server and put them into a workstation to get up and
running or copy data of the disks for the time until the hardware gets
fixed.

it highly depends on the hardware raid. The true hardware RAID with
hotspare, hotswap etc. support and with proper drivers (so you won't have to
boot into its bios to reconfigure it) will be much more reliable.

On the other hand, performance will probably be better with a dedicated
hardware raid controller.

it highly depends on the hardware raid. The true hardware RAID with XOR
counting and mirroring support will be much faster.

Although it's worth pointing out that software RAID-*1* (one of the
options under consideration) has almost no CPU overhead, and is often a
good low-cost option.

Part of your decision must rest on what exactly the machine will be
doing. Different RAID setups are best suited for different usage
patterns, e.g. RAID-5 is often a good general-purpose storage server
option, RAID-10 is usually recommended for database servers, etc.

Dave.
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