Thanks for sharing Grant. Your point about hardware raid is well taken. However, the discussion is about Fake-Raid vs. Software RAID1 and controller/chipset dependence and portability. The portability of a software RAID1 hard drive to an entirely different box is, I have learned, much higher and less time consuming. Grant McWilliams wrote: > > He had a two drive RAID 1 drives and at least one of them failed but he > didn't have any notification software set up to let him know that it had > failed. And since that's the case he didn't know if both drives had > failed or not. I wonder why he things software RAID would be a) more > reliable b) fix itself magically without telling him. He never did say > if he was able to use the second disk. I have 75 machines with 3ware > controllers and on the very rare occasion that a controller fails you > plug in another one and boot up. > > I don't use software RAID in any sort of production environment unless > it's RAID 0 and I don't care about the data at all. I've also tested the > speed between Hardware and Software RAID 5 and no matter how many CPUs > you throw at it the hardware will win. Even in the case when a 3ware > RAID controller only has one drive plugged in it will beat a single > drive plugged into the motherboard if applications are requesting > dissimilar data. One stream from an MD0 RAID 0 will be as fast as one > stream from a Hardware RAID 0. Multiple streams of dissimilar data will > be much faster on the Hardware RAID controller due to controller caching. > > Grant McWilliams > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS-virt mailing list > CentOS-virt at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt