[nmglug] Production server question

[Gary Sandine]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 04:37:17PM -0600, Brendan wrote:
> Software RAID is the way to go.  RAID cards are only a good idea
> if you have more IO than spare CPU.  An expensive RAID card is a
> single point of failure- software RAID on one PC is the same as
> software RAID on another- fry your controller card and a commodity
> part can take its place.  Fry your RAID card and you better pray
> they're still making them.

I very much agree with all of this.  However, I find hot-swapping
out failed drives to be much easier with certain hardware RAID cards
(I have experience with 3ware cards, and it has been easy for the
most part).  Unless something has changed, doing that safely with
software RAID requires mdadm commands and echoing carefully crafted
remove-single-device and add-single-device commands to
/proc/scsi/scsi followed by more mdadm commands.  It's
straightforward but not for everyone.

-- 
Gary Sandine <gars at laclinux.com>