thus Christopher Chan spake:
Thanks for your eMail, Ross. So, reading all the stuff here I'm really concerned about moving all our data to such a system. The reason we're moving is mainly, but not only the longisch fsck UFS (FreeBSD) needs after a crash. XFS seemed to me to fit perfectly as I never had issues with fsck here. However, this discussion seems to change my mindset. So, what would be an alternative (if possible not using hardware RAID controllers, as already mentioned)? ext3 is not, here we have long fsck runs, too. Even ext4 seems not too good in this area...
I thought 3ware would have been good. Their cards have been praised for quite some time...have things changed? What about Adaptec?
Well, for me the recommended LSI is okay as it's my favorite vendor, too. I used to abandon Adaptec quite a while ago and my optinion was confirmed when the OpenBSD vs. Adaptec discussion came up. However, the question on the hardware RAID's vendor is totally independent from the file system discussion.
I re-read XFS's FAQ on this issues, seems to me that we have to set up two machines in the lab, one purely software RAID driven, and one with a JBOD configured hardware RAID controller, and then benchmark and stress testing the setup.
Timo