[CentOS] OT: Suggestions for RAID HW for 2 SATA drives in DellPowerEdge SC

[Feizhou]

> About 10 seconds after I started this thread, I remembered a long discussion about
> RAID, SATA, etc., 2 or 3 months ago. I think that Feizhou (?) strongly recommended
> going with Software RAID in CentOS. I will search for that and do a lot of
> reading. RAID 1 for mirroring is what I want. Lanny

Whoa there!

Hardware raid + battery backed up memory cache in raid 1,10 mode is hard 
to beat with software raid and hardware raid offers data integrity 
guarantee beyond software raid.

If you were planning a huge array especially a raid5 array, then 
software raid may be better. Hardware RAID cards all come with memory 
caches now so their throughput is no longer limited.

Another route you can go is getting a PCI/PCIe/PCI-X BBU RAM/NVRAM card 
to put an external journal on to speed up fsync performance for 
filesystems like ext3 over software raid since these cards can go beyond 
1GB of memory unlike hardware raid cards that usually max out at 256MB.

Software RAID is also good if you need to be able to transfer the disks 
to another box that does not have a hardware raid controller or the same 
controller.

Weigh these in your decision. :-)