[ale] raid suggestions

[Solomon Peachy]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 02:44:39PM +0000, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> All I can say is I’ve been using hardware RAID cards almost 
> exclusively in Linux systems here for the last 7 years and have not 
> lost a single system due to the concerns raised here.  Sure some have 
> gone down due to controller issues in that time but getting them back 
> running hasn’t been a problem.  I’m no more concerned about controller 
> hardware failures than I am about drive and DIMM failures.  They occur 
> – your replace the failed parts and move on.

Yeah, this mirrors my experience too.

If you're concerned about RAID hardware failures (and/or availability 
concerns), you do the same thing you do for any other type of hardware: 
You buy a spare, and hope you'll never need to use it.

It's worth mentioning that some RAID controller manufacturers explicitly 
support forward-compatibility; if you can physically plug the drives 
into a newer card, their metadata will be read properly and it'll 
JustWork(tm).  I know 3Ware still does this, and back in the day the 
Mylex/IBM's DAC-series did this too.  I can't comment on any others 
other than to say that Promise's "high-end" cards are truly abysmal and 
sometimes the metadata isn't even compatible with newer firmware on the 
same card.  (I've been burned by two different Promise HW RAID model 
families; the infamous SX-6000 and a newer SATA one that basically 
killed a production server at my employer)

Anyway, enough rambling, and time to figure out why I'm not getting a 
timer triggered on this microcontroller.  (FreeRTOS running on an STM32, yay)

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy        		       pizza at shaftnet dot org	 
Melbourne, FL                          ^^ (mail/jabber/gtalk) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120210/2d2d152a/attachment.bin