[GRLUG] To Raid, or not to Raid, that is the question.

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 1:23 AM, Mike Williams <knightperson at zuzax.com> wrote:
> They are both forms of data redundancy but with different priorities. As
> Adam Williams (no relation) said, RAID is for uptime rather than data
> security. In the simple case of a hard drive failure, RAID lets you keep
> going without interruption, where backup takes the system down until you
> restore the backup. However, RAID is of no help at all for accidental
> deletion of files or file system corruption. Generally, the best solution is
> to have both.

+1

>
> And I agree on Linux's software RAID. The $35 RAID card you're thinking of
> is almost certainly doing RAID in software anyway and is little more than a
> regular hard drive controller, a BIOS, and a fancy driver. LVM on top of
> RAID is an excellent way to go if you have the expertise to get it all
> running. It was fairly miserable to do by hand last time I tried it, but
> that was years ago and I think the situation is much better now.

+1

On that note, some "RAID cards" are little more than massive SATA
controllers with BIOS for implementing a proprietary form of software
RAID. However, they can still be used as straight RAID cards.

I've got two 8-port PCI/PCI-X cards which were <$50 software raid
cards, but I really only use them as SATA controllers.

-- 
:wq

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