Scott Silva wrote:
Drew Weaver spake the following on 6/8/2006 11:15 AM:
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.
The only time I had a real software raid problem, it was self-inflicted. I tried to use all the channels on an ide card. Using desktop drives instead of enterprise drives can also jinx it.
I was using software RAID 0/5 back in 97-99-ish on extremely busy web servers and never lost any data or suffered any failures. I've used it on and off since then and have never lost any data whatsoever as a result of a software RAID failure. Nowadays, I don't really bother with it because 3Ware cards are so cheap, but software RAID has been stable under Linux for MANY years. If Drew is having those kinds of problems, he's either having wetware issues or is using dodgy/unsupported hardware.
Cheers,