Why 100% hardware RAID is best

  • Article

Everyone knows software RAID is slower and because of this most RAID installations are using hardware RAID controllers. But most RAID controllers require special software drivers. And in many cases, that is just the start of your troubles. I just built my system with a transparent RAID controller requiring no software. Here is why I chose this specifcially and when you should consider this too. It is not the best in all cases as often the hardware software combos can offer other features, but especially in workstations transparent hardware shoudl strongly be considered. More

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2006
    have you ever heard of Raid-Z and ZFS?

    http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bonwick?entry=raid_z
  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2006
    Interesting, but would still not be appropriate to my case. No matter how efficient the software, software is a week link in restores, and especially recovery and multi booting. I needed a hardware only solution.

    Also he makes some valid points, but he also omits the weaknesses. It may be only 700 lines of code, but it depends on the file system adding a whole layer of complexity. If anything happens to the FS, you cannot recover your RAID data, and there are other such issues introduced by introducing such a huge additional external factor.

    That being said, in some applications it certainly looks useful