On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Arun Khan knura9@gmail.com wrote:
I'll argue that the software RAID process is slightly more complex. And it is crucial that one remember to hot-remove the disk ... after all one could panic their box by just yanking the drive.
Yes, this could happen inspite of well documented procedures. For this reason, hardware RAID has been a consideration. However, I have come to realize that it has it's own pros and cons as mentioned in this thread.
I've hot-swapped lots of SCA and SATA drives in and out of software md raids and never had a problem. Assuming you have appropriate disk carriers or one of those trayless swappable SATA bays, hot-swap is part of the hardware spec (there may be a few very old SATA controllers that don't notice, though). I'd always prefer software raid for simple mirroring but would use hardware for raid5, etc., where it offloads the parity computation.