Re: hardware raid vs. software raid

On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 17:20 +0100, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
My concern is that we are going to have only one server. So if there was
a hardware problem, with software raid I could just temporarily move the
disks to an ordinary workstation and serve the data from there. With
hardware raid, I suppose I would have to wait for replacement parts.

If you do the following:

1. Take a snapshot of the system after installing and configuring
everything.

2. Make good backups of /home and (for Samba /etc/samba)

then you can get back up and running en very little time.

I take periodic snapshots of servers when I get a chance to restart them
(like after a kernel update scheduled for after hours. Takes me a
couple of minutes to make a tarball of the / partition and regular
bakcups take care of /home and databases. Thanks to the kind of
unstable power around here that can blow a UPS and everything on it in
one go, I've had to recover whole servers a few times. Above recipy
works every time.

As for software v.s. hardware, for a simple raid-1 I find software good
enough but only if cost is really a huge factor. If I do Raid-5 I
insist on a raid card. Adaptec 2410SA PCI SATA (and the SCSI
equivalent) has served me very well.

Hans


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Both sides of Mirrored Drives showing as separate drives
    ... As to your last comment regarding the hardware RAID, ... data if you break/recreate the RAID array..... ... > Basically, these servers have the OS on Mirrored/RAID1 disks, and BOTH ... Looking at the Disk Management MMC, it correctly shows the mirror, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.general)
  • Re: ATA Raid
    ... > By testing I mean force a failure and see what happens. ... > all these mobo installed RAID controllers don't provide real hardware ... After system crashes (those servers are incredible unreliable for reasons ... chance to test any on that hardware. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: MotherBoard Change
    ... If she boots she'll start detecting hardware changes. ... HAL' can be forced and work on the new mobo (see MS about forcing HAL ... The procedure for going from what was software RAID on the old system to ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • RE: BugCheck and Supposed Reboot
    ... Windows Updates are NOT installed. ... To answer your RAID question - No IBM hardware, ... >> software changes to those Servers and they have been in production for over ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: [opensuse] Raid 5 installation
    ... I also purchased 4 WD 400G SATA drives to make a 1.09T ... raid5 array under Linux, SUSE 10.2. ... (which would defeat the hardware raid controller builtin to the MB). ...
    (SuSE)