On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Gordon Messmer wrote: > On 03/06/2013 08:35 AM, Arun Khan wrote: > >> Any preference between 1 and 2 above. > > Based on about 10 years of running a hundred or so systems with 3ware > controllers, I would say that you're better off with an LSI MegaRAID > card, or with Linux software RAID. 3ware cards themselves have been the > most problematic component of any system I've run in my entire > professional career (starting in 1996). Even very recent cards fail in > a wide variety of ways, and there is no guarantee that if your array > fails using a controller that you buy now that you'll be able to connect > it to a controller that you buy later. @ Gordon - thanks for sharing this piece of info! In case of RAID card failure, it is important to be able to recover the data (RAID device) with a compatible replacement. Are the LSI MegaRAID controller more reliable in this respect? > At this point, I deploy almost exclusively systems running Linux with > KVM on top of software RAID. While I lose the battery backed write > cache (which is great for performance unless you sustain enough writes > to fill it completely, at which point the system grinds nearly to a > halt), I gain a consistent set of management tools and the ability to > move a disk array to any hardware that accepts the same form factor > disk. The reliability of my systems has improved significantly since I > moved to software RAID. Software RAID is an option but I don't think hot swap is possible without some tinkering with the mdadm tool a priori. The systems will go to client site (remote), prefer to keep the support calls to remove/replace hardware activity :( Thanks, -- Arun Khan