16 Jul
2020
16 Jul
'20
8:52 a.m.
With modern hardware, it's easier, cheaper and
more flexible to build
and manage arrays in software, using modern filesystems such as ZFS,
Btrfs, or MS Storage Spaces on Windows Server.
I have never used a SW RAID solution (except for a RAID 0 on Win2K3 for the boot drive)
and have used HW controllers in my more recent systems (I am particular to the Areca
Controllers - cheap but effective with a good feature mix). What I find problematic with
RAID (specially RAID 6) is that with the larger drives we have in use today build (or more
importantly rebuild/recovery) times are extremely long. Long enough that you could have a
second drive failure during that time based on statistics.
This is an article (for the layman) written in 2010 predicting the lack of usability of
RAID 6 by 2019: www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/. I found the math
in it interesting and the conclusions pretty true to my experience.
I am wondering if SW RAID is faster in rebuild times by now (using the full power of the
multi-core processors) vs. a dedicated HW controller (even one with dual cores).
-Ali