[mythtv-users] RAID suggestions?

Jay R. Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Sat Oct 27 18:40:22 UTC 2007


On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 11:11:41PM -0400, Richard Freeman wrote:
> An advantage of software raid is that it is a lot more flexible - linux
> allows you to reshape a raid5 if you add additional drives later - most
> hardware raid solutions don't support this.  If anything does go wrong
> you're also somewhat more likely to be able to recover with software
> raid.  On the other hand hardware raid can provide battery-backed cache
> to more safely speed up disk access and usually hardware raid cards
> support high-end features like hot-swapping drives/etc.  Linux software
> raid itself would handle drive swapping pretty transparently (if less
> automatically in most distros) but I wouldn't go yanking cables unless
> you're sure that your IDE/SATA controller won't go haywire.

A disadvantage of software RAID is that a) it's a moving target: if you
upgrade your kernel, your RAID drivers change, and b) it's in the same
processor domain as the rest of your code -- it's next to impossible
for a broken non-disk driver to fundamentally screw up the code running
in a RAID card, while that's less impossible in a software RAID setup..

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                     '87 e24
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