[mythtv-users] RAID BTDT's

[Brian Wood]

On Apr 1, 2006, at 3:28 AM, <drescher0110-lists at yahoo.com> wrote:


>
> Hardware sata raid less than $200. Better try ebay...

That's what I thought, but your reference to a "little more money"  
made me wonder if you knew something I didn't :-)

>
> I believe your best bet is to use software raid and an oridinary  
> sata controller for
> several reasons reliability, hot swapping, monitoring, and also it  
> is not
> proprietary. Linux software raid has the tools to help you repair  
> your array when
> problems happen and at times you can force arrays to mount even if  
> they are in a bad
> state. With linux software raid you can add or remove a drive from  
> your array while
> your system is booted into linux, I have done this several times on  
> a 2TB software
> raid6 array with the array mounted and in use. And linux raid is  
> not tied to any
> specific controller so if you ever need to move the array to a new  
> pc you do not
     have to use the same exact controller as you did in the previous  
pc.

I'm using software RAID now, I have 2 250GB SATA drives running  
(software) RAID-0. I'd like to add a drive and move the array to  
RAID-5, but I worry about the CPU overhead of having to calculate the  
parity data.


>
> I did not mention speed because both software and bios raid use the  
> system processor
> to perform the raid operations so there should not be much if any  
> speed difference.
>

The only advantage I can see to "BIOS" RAID would be if for some  
reason you wanted to be able to use the array on both Linux and  
Windows, I can't envision a situation where you'd want to do this,  
but it would be possible with BIOS RAID and not with Linux software  
RAID.