[Newserver] so far...

[David Holland]

On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 21:08 -0600, Jay West wrote:
<snip>
> 
> I've always been a huge fan of dedicated raid controllers as they far 
> outperform software controllers and I've really never had a problem with 
> them. Even the "on-board" raid controllers are mostly software driven as I 
> understand it. But disk speed isn't really an issue in this setup, so maybe 
> for cost reasons we just use on-board raid. Or, JBOD and let FreeBSD do the 
> raid via geom/vinum.

The only disadvantages I've seen (or heard of) with hardware raid is if
you loose the card, you have to replace it with an identical one,
(including firmware revisions) or you'll possibly loose the data. 

I suspect, (but don't know) that if you loose the disk you have to
replace it with one of the same geometry, with hardware raid.

This may or may not be a concern for you.  (It is w/ my "consumer grade"
setup at home, however if I were doing this at work, I'd be less
concerned.)

<snip>

> As to # of drives... I prefer 2 for the OS, mirrored. I don't want a drive 
> failure taking the box down. As for the data partition(s), I would like 
> raid5, because if we run out of space I'd rather add a drive at a time, not 
> two at a time. Perhaps we start with 3 drives instead of four. Thoughts?

Seems reasonable. <shrug> I'm partial to pure mirroring it makes some of
my migrations easier, but that's my personal choice.   (Split the
mirrors and viola, you've two copies of the data) 

(FYI, Google implies that dynamically resizing your RAID5 array may be
controller dependant btw.) 

> 
> Jay
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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