"Lars Boegild Thomsen" <lth@cow.dk> wrote in message
news:1157438449.671124@x330.netcompartner.com...
> Jeremy Boden wrote:
>
>> Using software RAID is flawed.
>> Get a hardware SCSI card (dropping the IDE would also be good).
>
> Hmmmmm - I am actually not sure I would agree on that. I have several
> times found myself losing data on a hardware raid system that failed in
> some spectacular way that was impossible to fix with the available tools
> (the mere mention of the word "Promise" doubles my blood pressure). On
> the other hand - I have yet to lose any data EVER using Linux software
> raid-1. The great thing as I see it is that using for example lvm or
> ext3 on top of raid-1 each of the disks is a valid stand-alone disk in
> case the raid screws up - not that I have ever seen that happen either.
> So in case of failure I can move one of the disks to another system and
> always recover the files even without ever getting the raid up again.
> Even performance is reasonably impressive (read: faster than a single
> disk for reads and about the same for writes).
>
> I admit I lost some data once on a Linux software raid-5, so since then
> I've only used raid-1. I just like the fact that you can read the disk
> even without getting raid up and running.
>
> --
> Lars

Hmmm. I have enough of these 45GB drives around that I could do a whole
bunch of RAID1 arrays too, but first I have to get past the initial problem.
I would need to use lvm to span the disks into a single partition which I
suspect opens me up to a bit more risk, but less than an insane array. The
only RAID data loss I ever had was a RAID5 array with a hardware controller.
Software RAID5 has been very good to me under Red Hat 9.

Mark