Software RAID has failed us so many times in the past that I would never recommend it to anyone. Things like: the raid breaking for no reason and the server continually rebuilding over and over, and once a drive does finally die the other drive wasn't being mirrored properly (or wouldn't boot even though we manually sync'd the bootloaders as suggested.).
It has been nothing but a hassle, so if you need reliable data you need to find a card that works for you, I'm not sure why people are so ready to suggest software raid when the fact is its pretty unreliable.
-Drew
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Lazy Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 2:09 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Raid Cards
2006/6/6, Feizhou feizhou@graffiti.net:
Forget this proprietary software raid drivers. Just use the kernel software raid capabilities. There has yet to appear a company that manufactures bios on a chip raid cards that provide adequate or even minimal linux driver support.
(please don't tell me that 3ware is the only make to use, tw_cli is
not
exactly user friendly).
If you don't like hardware raid then there is nothing else for you.
Check out areca. The driver is in tree (writen by areca). And it looks like they are actively supporting linux.
There was some nice performance comparison betwean linux compatible sata raid cards and areca performed really well. If my memory serves me well it was significantly faster then 3ware. Can't find the url now :(. So i have no arguments to support it now. But certainly areca it's worth a try.