[CentOS] Internal RAID controllers question

[Gordon Messmer]

On 05/08/2016 06:51 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
> In the
> past LSI would be my definite second choice, and 3ware was winning me only
> by their transparent web interface.


3ware had a much more pleasant web UI and CLI, but their hardware was 
terribly unreliable and their performance was pretty awful, too.

Today, your options with hardware controllers are mostly LSI with its 
gawd-awful management software, or Adaptec, or Areca.  I rarely see the 
latter controllers anywhere.  They tend to be less expensive than LSI, 
but they don't benchmark as well, and their smaller market share may 
fuel doubt about their future prospects.

And that, I think, underscores a larger point that people try to make in 
these conversations, which is: There is no rational case to group 
hardware RAID controllers together and discuss them exclusively.  There 
are pros and cons to each specific product family and no single quality 
that disqualifies discussion of other options.  That is, the differences 
between an LSI card and an Adaptec card are no less significant than the 
differences between an LSI RAID array and a software defined array.

My take is this: RAID should not be part of your long-term planning.  
Everything that's not SAN is moving to software defined storage.  
Microsoft is moving to Storage Spaces.  The UNIX world is moving toward 
ZFS and btrfs.  There are a number of reasons, including hierarchical 
storage and hybrid storage.  Most significant in my opinion though is 
that while most RAID type can detect spontaneous bit flips, they cannot 
repair them.  You may not use ZFS or btrfs today, but you should 
definitely be looking at these, long term.