[GRLUG] Enterprise hard drives

[Tim Schmidt]

On 4/4/07, David Pembrook <david at pembrook.net> wrote:
> I appoligize for the tone of that... The real point of the comment was
> that the whole thing sounded religious and you'll find people taking
> both sides. It would be hard to find someone with more bias towards it
> than a Linux kernel code maintainer. I'm not interested in a fact-based
> argument though looking at pro's and con's is good.
>
> That said...
>
> While Linux software raid does not make for vendor tie in, it does make
> for OS tie in. On a desktop system I want the choice of booting the best
> OS for the task, my task.. That fact is overlooked in the article
> because he only lives in the Linux world. I don't want Linux or Window's
> software raid. Either way, those software raid setups limit my choice.

Excellently put.  A hardware RAID card's driver availability will also
limit your choice, sometimes to a single flavor of Linux (RHEL 4 for
instance), but you'll usually be able to pick one flavor of two or
three OSs.  Some manufacturers do better or worse of course.

Just as Jeff Garzik says, there's no single best solution for all
cases.  That being said, on linux, software raid tends to be the best
choice more often than not.

--tim