On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Arun Khan <knura9 at gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I'll argue that the software RAID process is slightly more complex. And it >> is crucial that one remember to hot-remove the disk ... after all one >> could panic their box by just yanking the drive. >> > > Yes, this could happen inspite of well documented procedures. For > this reason, hardware RAID has been a consideration. However, I have > come to realize that it has it's own pros and cons as mentioned in > this thread. I've hot-swapped lots of SCA and SATA drives in and out of software md raids and never had a problem. Assuming you have appropriate disk carriers or one of those trayless swappable SATA bays, hot-swap is part of the hardware spec (there may be a few very old SATA controllers that don't notice, though). I'd always prefer software raid for simple mirroring but would use hardware for raid5, etc., where it offloads the parity computation. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com