[rescue] little low-wattage servers

Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Mon Feb 6 13:43:11 CST 2012


> 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.

...when it's applicable.

> Even without ZFS, LVM on top of MD raid (on Linux, or course),

Not everyone runs Linux, "of course" or not.  Nor should.

> Only caveat being that you can't boot from RAID-5+,

That's another plausible reason.

Firmware (or, occasionally, hardware) RAID has the property (at least
when done right - anything can be done wrong) that it requires no
support whatever from the software running on the host.  You can boot
from it, you can run specialized software that's never _heard_ of
software RAID, and it all Just Works.  It also doesn't soak up host CPU
cycles.  In some cases these properties are advantages.

Software RAID has the property (ditto) that it requires no support from
the hardware.  The disk, the machine, don't have to - and, in a sense,
cannot - know RAID is going on.  This makes for transportability and
easy bugfixes.  In some cases these properties are advantages.

And, of course, each one has its costs.  But to speak of the advantages
of either as though everyone shared them, or should share them,
is...misleading, at best.

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