On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 12:09, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
Often it is because for the extra money, you get no extra features except being locked into some particular vendor's product
As I have pointed out before, that depends on the vendor.
Please don't blanket all vendors as the same. Some vendors have 6+ years of proven inter-product hardware RAID volume compatibility with excellent Linux support.
Even if they permit drives to move between different models it still means you have to have a spare compatible one handy if your primary box dies.
3Ware has maintained 6+ years of inter-model volume compatibility -- far more, far better and far longer than Linux's MD/LVM which has gone through several, significant changes. This is indisputable, despite the insistance of some in the MD/LVM community -- it's more about ignorance of 3Ware than usage (or improper usage of 3Ware cards for software RAID, instead of using their hardware RAID features).
You can mount one partition out of an md RAID1 set directly as the underlying partition, bypassing any concern about compatibility of md versions if you need to recover data. LVM is a different story.
Nothing against the 3Ware cards - I agree they are very good, although you did forget to mention the various bugs they have had and fixed over those 6+ years.