Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote: > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 11:14:18AM -0700, Benjamin Franz wrote: > >> Yup. 8 way RAID1 for the OS, 8 way RAID6 for the data. I was hoping when >> I setup the 8-way RAID1 for the OS that I would get really good read >> speeds since md is supposed to stripe reads from RAID1, but in practice >> the RAID6 completely kills it for read performance (~61 MB/sec from the >> RAID1 partition vs ~200 MB/sec from the RAID6 partition). >> >> In a deeply ironic turn of events, one of the hard drives in that >> machine died in a way that freaked the hardware controller driver out >> and caused a kernel panic last week. >> >> > > I've also seen CentOS 5.3 (or 5.4, not sure) crash when a single sata hdd failed. > The system was running mdadm RAID-1 mirror, so it shouldn't have been fatal event.. > > There was kernel oops on the console. too bad I didn't have time to capture it then. > System was running AHCI SATA on Intel ICH9 controller, with mdadm software raid. > > So there's still need for hardware RAID controllers.. > I'm not sure that is a good conclusion. The controller *is* a (3ware) hardware RAID controller - but the drive failure caused the 3ware driver to crash. That I wasn't using the controller in HW RAID mode may not be a good indicator that all would have been well if I had been. -- Benjamin Franz