RAID Controllers and Linux: Ugh!

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Fri Jun 29 17:06:24 EDT 2007


On 6/29/07, Warren Luebkeman <warren at resara.com> wrote:
>
> Since we are on the subject of servers, I am now dealing with an issue
> that I
> always face when using a new server configuration:  Is the RAID Card
> supported in Linux?  I usually like to go with Adaptec RAID cards because
> they provide Linux driver sources so we can compile the driver ourselves.


 ....

I guess this is more of a frustrated rant rather than a question.  It looks
> like I will have to use the Adaptec card, which I have no problem with,
> except that its about $400.  Just seems silly (and incredibly annoying) to
> me.


I used to be all for hardware raid but my thinking has changed over the
years.  I prefer software RAID that the OS supports w/o extra drivers

I saw someone reconfigure a hardware RAID on Solaris and make a mistake in
fstab.  Solaris was installed on the RAID and wouldn't boot.  The install CD
would boot, but it didn't have the drivers for the RAID so he couldn't mount
/etc to edit fstab.  That mistake cost him a few hours to fix.

Hardware RAID has a dedicated CPU to handle the XORing for RAID 5.  That was
important when you had a 486.  Now you have a multicore multi GHz cpu with
extra capacity.  Doing an extra computation will not add much overhead.

What if the RAID card dies?  Can you get a replacement that can read the
RAID disks you have now?

Sun's 3510FC RAID box had a firmware bug that would make disks disappear.
It happened to 2 drives in a RAID 5 configuration I had.  I had a corrupted
RAID and lost the data.  There have been 2 patches since then.

I'm now using ZFS on Solaris which needs to disable the hardware RAID to do
its error correction and compression.  It gets patches automatically with
the OS (similar to yum/apt-get).
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