[CoLoCo] SATA RAID controller

[Kevin Fries]

On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 02:20 -0700, W S wrote:
> Seriously, software RAID is your friend.  Is there a specific reason
> you want to go with hardware based RAID?  3ware has been in the
> mainline kernel for a long time, and it's the only SATA/IDE RAID
> controller I trust.

Other than Mirroring (Raid-1), software RAID has had some reliability
problems in terms of data recovery.  Its been a known problem, and will
hopefully be fixed in Hardy, but I am not holding out hope.  Bottom line
is that if you are using a RAID (especially RADI-5) for a boot disk, you
have a real potential of building a suicidal machine.  If the RAID
fails, the OS will kill itself.  This is not a problem with hardware
RAID.

Jim and I both participate in a mail group that discussed this exact
issue about a month ago, so I understand his desire for hardware RAID.
For mirroring, I have often use software RAID, but for parity with
striping, I would never, ever trust it.  Even for mirroring, if the
machine is important enough, I don't always trust software RAID.  Too
many incidences of lazy writes to the mirror.

-- 
Kevin Fries
Senior Linux Engineer
Computer and Communications Technology, Inc
A Division of Japan Communications Inc.