[ale] raid suggestions

[mike at trausch.us]

On 02/14/2012 10:20 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> So you can disassemble all the components in the systems you buy and
> do chip or board level debugging of all components including DIMMs,
> CPUs and motherboards?  Of all the reasons I've seen for not using
> hardware RAID this one seems to be the biggest red herring of all.

It is impossible to do our jobs without *some* level of treating things
as black boxes.  However, for the most part, the things we treat as
black boxes have standard interfaces and are therefore interchangable.

For example, I don't much care about which SATA chipset is in a system,
as long as it implements AHCI and can be talked to with the standard
AHCI driver.  Same goes for USB 1.x, 2.x and 3.x, or console displays,
or serial ports, CPUs, memory, PCI, etc.

IOW, if I can take a component from one vendor and swap it out with a
replacement from another vendor without having to do any extra work that
is a direct result of using another vendor's widget, I will happily
treat it as a black box.  None of my specialties lie in hardware.

I see no need for hardware RAID in this day and age, period.  There will
always be someone out there that desires to use thing X for any given X,
but that does not mean that there is an actual _need_ to do so.

And while I realize that software RAID is a point for "vendor lock-in"
(e.g., all $KRNL in { Linux, FreeBSD, Windows } do it differently), it's
something that is (at least in the case of Linux and FreeBSD)
transparent.  And you can use it in the same style as hardware RAID,
with a single I/O path between the host and the array if desired.

Plus, you get more for less; I can support software RAID without
spending extra money to call $VENDOR in, and in most cases that I have
encountered I can respond far more quickly than calling $VENDOR in.  So,
IME, from a practical standpoint, hardware RAID buys nothing, save for
$LAWSUIT_TARGET when fecal matter hits the blades attached to the large
spinning motor above one's head...

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 729 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120214/1d2e9215/attachment.bin