[mythtv-users] RAID suggestions?

[Steve Hodge]

On 10/28/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 11:11:41PM -0400, Richard Freeman wrote:
> > An advantage of software raid is that it is a lot more flexible - linux
> > allows you to reshape a raid5 if you add additional drives later - most
> > hardware raid solutions don't support this.  If anything does go wrong
> > you're also somewhat more likely to be able to recover with software
> > raid.  On the other hand hardware raid can provide battery-backed cache
> > to more safely speed up disk access and usually hardware raid cards
> > support high-end features like hot-swapping drives/etc.  Linux software
> > raid itself would handle drive swapping pretty transparently (if less
> > automatically in most distros) but I wouldn't go yanking cables unless
> > you're sure that your IDE/SATA controller won't go haywire.
>
> A disadvantage of software RAID is that a) it's a moving target: if you
> upgrade your kernel, your RAID drivers change, and b) it's in the same
> processor domain as the rest of your code -- it's next to impossible
> for a broken non-disk driver to fundamentally screw up the code running
> in a RAID card, while that's less impossible in a software RAID setup..
>

One point that hasn't been made is that Linux software RAID is open source
and so has all of the benefits that open source brings to the table.
Hardware RAID controllers are closed source applications.

Cheers,
Steve
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