[rescue] little low-wattage servers

[Andrew Jones]

On 02/06/2012 12:32 PM, J. Alexander Jacocks wrote:
>
> Also, how many folks are using hardware raid, at all, these days?  I
> discovered several years ago that properly configured software RAID is much
> faster, and quite often easier to manage, than hardware RAID.  I have a
> whole drawer full of hardware RAID controllers that I no longer use.
>
> Even without ZFS, LVM on top of MD raid (on Linux, or course), is pretty
> darned easy.  Only caveat being that you can't boot from RAID-5+, but
> that's easily remedied with a RAID-1 /boot.

Barrier support is imperfect when it works at all.  If you don't have 
working barriers, then SW RAID with drive caches turned off is miserably 
slow.

I'd rather have WCE=0 and an external, battery-backed cache any day of 
the week, even with the many irritations of HW RAID.