[CentOS] [OT/HW] hardware raid -- comment/experience with 3Ware

Wed Mar 13 20:54:05 UTC 2013
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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