Hardware vs software RAID (was: RAID Controllers and Linux)

[Tom Buskey]

On 6/29/07, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/29/07, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> > Software RAID in Linux handles this quite well.
> >
> > The process was:
> >   * see the drive fail in logs
>
>   One thing I liked about the MegaRAID setups we had was that the steps
> were:
>
> Hear loud beeping coming from the buzzer on the card

Note flashing red light on failed drive


I've had those buzzers fail and my logs are the only indication.  I've had
network equipment that has the dual red/green LEDs.  I'm red/green
colorblind (like 15% of the male population) and cannot see the difference
if it's a light shade of green/red.  Also, my server rooms tend to be a in a
closet, across a hallway or building, several floors away with no one
entering them for days at a time.  There's nothing wrong with the buzzers,
but if you're not there to hear them, they don't matter.  Logs or other
monitoring systems can reach me when I'm not in the room.  They can survive
failures when they're on a separate system (email from logwatch, syslog
server, etc)

Yank drive and pop in new one
> Go back to playing Starcraft


I wish ;-p

  ;-)
>
> >   * shutdown the system when the drive arrives
>
>   Ewwww.  I thought you could do hotswap with Linux software RAID?


It depends.

SATA hardware is hotswap by spec.  Does the driver?  I know Solaris 10u3
doesn't hotswap SATA.
Standard IDE hardware doesn't hotswap.
Older SCSI isn't hotswap but you could get away with it if the fuse didn't
blow.
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