On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 at 3:50pm, Les Mikesell wrote
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
The large SAN vendors usually don't recommend building raid5 sets larger than 6-8 disks, and will stripe or concatenate multiple of those on the typical SAN with 100s of spindles. Myself, I'll stick with RAID10 for anything critical.
Would that I had the money to and still get the space I need. Even doing 2 12 disk RAID6 sets (each with a hot spare) gets you 9TB which is 50% more space for the same money as RAID10.
You are omitting the cost of the raid controller here. For your 12+ ports you don't have much other choice except a dedicated network device. For the size
What do you mean by a dedicated network device -- do you mean a NAS? Not true. See, e.g., http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i10219/amd-storage-server.php.
that normal people need - or that you might use on other machines, you might
Are you implying I'm not normal? ;)
have the option of running raid10 (or 0 + LVM) in software on the motherboard ports plus some dumb $20/port cards and buying several extra drives.
On that note, what cheap add-in SATA controllers have folks had good luck with? I haven't tried *too* hard, but the couple I've tried were far less than stable.
There is one advantage of hardware RAID that hasn't been mentioned yet, and that's hot-swap. Last time I tried, software RAID fell over when a HDD suddenly disappeared.