On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Tony Mountifield <tony at softins.co.uk> wrote: > I have no problem understanding the options and following the procedures. > My question was just to see whether other people's experience would suggest > it was worth the effort of going down the hardware RAID and proprietary > driver route. >From the HP info http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/dynamicsmartarray/ it looks like this is a software raid card, you're probably better of just using mdraid unless your card has a flash backed write cache module _or_ you need drive format compatibility with other smart array controllers. "...Eliminating most of the hardware RAID controller components, and relocating advanced RAID algorithms from a hardware-based controller into device driver software lowers the total solution cost,.."