On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:21 PM, C. R. Oldham <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cro@ncbt.org">cro@ncbt.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
On Oct 22, 2008, at 11:01 AM, Paul Kidwell wrote:<br>
<br>
><br>
> I tried setting it up with various flavors of Linux with no success.<br>
> RocketRaid says their board<br>
> has linux drivers, but I failed in every attempt to get it running. RR<br>
> tech support told me I had<br>
> the wrong type hard drives. (i.e. they blew me off)<br>
<br>
</div>My recommendation is that you ditch hardware RAID and use Linux kernel<br>
RAID support. It is very reliable and fast. Consider the following:<br>
<br>
1. What will you do if the RAID card goes bad? You will likely lose<br>
your entire array. Even if you replace the RAID card my experience<br>
has been if the new card is not identical in every way, it may not see<br>
the array on your disks. Linux RAID doesn't have this problem. If<br>
the machine that hosts your array keels over, you just have to attach<br>
your individual disks to any other Linux machine with a similar kernel<br>
revision and tell the MD system to assemble the array and you have<br>
access to your data again.<br>
<br>
2. Storage is cheap, I recommend using RAID 10 instead of 5. With<br>
RAID 10 you can lose 1 or possibly 2 disks and still have access to<br>
your data. With RAID 5, you can only lose 1 disk.</blockquote><div><br>It isn't that cheap. RAID 10 is stripping on mirrors so you're still buying double your usable storage. RAID 6 is a better option. 2 disk failures but you only lose a % of your usable space due to double parity. <br>
<br>Kevin</div></div><br>