Setting: We are setting up a low usage server for an alfresco km/collaboration system It is a low-end server with a pair of 1.5 TB disks we will be mirroring The server comes with Intel's on-board 'fake raid/ low-end RAID' capability and for price reasons we have not selected a mainstream RAID card
Prior thoughts: Searches on the net indicate no performance advantage, and possible performance disadvantages to the on-board RAID I expect Intel & the Centos product to be rough equivalents in quality
I am leaning to software RAID for a simple reason of minimizing my administration & operational burden. If I need to perform repairs, obtain alerts it is the same administration toolset rather than a BIOS-based tool that seems to be accessible only through boot/ reboot.
Question: Over a reasonable lifecycle are we better served going with the on-board or Centos' software RAID? Any issue with booting from the RAID (obviously RAID 1)?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
Dave
On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:07 PM, David Hornford dave@qillaq.com wrote:
Setting: We are setting up a low usage server for an alfresco km/collaboration system It is a low-end server with a pair of 1.5 TB disks we will be mirroring The server comes with Intel's on-board 'fake raid/ low-end RAID' capability and for price reasons we have not selected a mainstream RAID card Prior thoughts: Searches on the net indicate no performance advantage, and possible performance disadvantages to the on-board RAID I expect Intel & the Centos product to be rough equivalents in quality I am leaning to software RAID for a simple reason of minimizing my administration & operational burden. If I need to perform repairs, obtain alerts it is the same administration toolset rather than a BIOS-based tool that seems to be accessible only through boot/ reboot. Question: Over a reasonable lifecycle are we better served going with the on-board or Centos' software RAID? Any issue with booting from the RAID (obviously RAID 1)? Thanks in advance for your thoughts. Dave _______________________________________________
You'll get the same benefits by using Linux's software RAID + it's easier to setup and you won't be "vendor tied", i.e. if the motherboard packs up and you can't get exactly the same one, or another one with the same RAID chipset. You simply put the drives into another PC and you're up and running again.
At Sun, 13 Feb 2011 13:07:09 -0800 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Setting: We are setting up a low usage server for an alfresco km/collaboration system It is a low-end server with a pair of 1.5 TB disks we will be mirroring The server comes with Intel's on-board 'fake raid/ low-end RAID' capability and for price reasons we have not selected a mainstream RAID card
Prior thoughts: Searches on the net indicate no performance advantage, and possible performance disadvantages to the on-board RAID I expect Intel & the Centos product to be rough equivalents in quality
I am leaning to software RAID for a simple reason of minimizing my administration & operational burden. If I need to perform repairs, obtain alerts it is the same administration toolset rather than a BIOS-based tool that seems to be accessible only through boot/ reboot.
Question: Over a reasonable lifecycle are we better served going with the on-board or Centos' software RAID? Any issue with booting from the RAID (obviously RAID 1)?
You are always going to be better off using Linux (CentOS) software RAID. There are no issues with booting off a RAID 1. You'll create two partitions on the disks: a small one for /boot and the rest to be a LVM volume group (carved into swap, /, and your data and/or /home). You'll make two RAID sets, one for /boot and the other for the LVM volume group. The only trickyness is to be sure to install grub on both disks -- this lets you boot off /dev/sdb if/when /dev/sda dies.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
Dave
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