On Thursday 02 November 2017 14:10:25 Bowie Bailey wrote:
If you want raid 5 or 6, then you should get a hardware controller. For raid 1, mdadm should work just fine. I would suggest trying it before buying a raid controller. If it works for you, you save a few hundred dollars and you have one less piece of hardware to worry about.
I haven't looked at them in quite a few years, but last time I was in the market for a raid controller, Areca controllers were the way to go.
I've used MDADM before on previous servers, but have found that this setup isn't hot swap. Ultimately if I had to replace a drive it involved a lot of effort, especially the first drive.
By using H/W RAID, it's literally just a case of removing the dead drive and inserting the replacement. I've got a number of IBM and DELL boxes like this. it's just a pity they're not compatible with Linux so I can't monitor or manage them while the servers are running. The only way I know I have problems is by watching the LEDS