11 Oct
2004
11 Oct
'04
1:50 p.m.
On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, Jay West wrote:
Everyone who is talking about "software raid is
ok because I've used it
without trouble"... that's a pretty insufficient argument. Kinda like someone
saying "Oh, you can format double density floppies to single density and it
works great because I did it". B.S. - a little education and you'd see why
it's precarious. I've seen people who argue about that because they have
"proof it works fine". Just wait till a few months go by and their data
doesn't appear anymore :) Not that software raid doesn't work, it does, and
quite well. But all I'm saying is a better argument might sway me. That one
doesn't.
Well it's your box, and your decision, but I don't see why
RAID drivers are any more suspect than another software driver.
I don't however understand why criticizing it on the number
of likely overlapping I/O transfers is valid. There's far more
complex software in there already.
In fact I think that RAID is a waste of time and money and
complexity; you can get a lot of inexpensive, simple and reliable
performance by using one EIDE per drive (with CDROM a slave on
any) and "big" drive(s) chosen to be right at the beginnign of
the steep-price knee. Split archives and lists onto drives/mount
points, your oldest drive as OS, one of (two?) new, big drives
rsync -ua one to the other for "mirror", etc. Cheap, simple,
fast, easy, changable later, etc.
If you've got a 100Mbit ether, it's unlikely it will exceed
the disk or OS speed.
I'll let others have the last word on this.