[nycbug-talk] Fwd: Adaptec AAC raid support

[Marco Scoffier]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 01:15:46PM -0500, Isaac Levy wrote:
>With that stated, as the dust is settling with this issue- and myself  
>being a bit outside of the daily-use OpenBSD camp, what is everyone  
>going to use for RAID on OpenBSD?  (I'm particularly interested in sata  
>hardware raid...?!?)
>

What I wonder is if hardware is really the way to go.  What's the difference in
overhead btw say a hardware raid5 and putting the card in jbod mode and running
raidctl.  [ I have not googled this lately ]

The huge advantages of software raid are :

  1) a consistent interface across different hardware (useful that one time in
  three years that a disk needs to be replaced in some server and you don't
  remember the ctrl-F1 or whatever combo to get into a particular hardware
  vendor's raid software.)

  2) tested code, the software raid code in any of the BSDs is probably a lot
  better tested that whatever is built into the raidcontroller-du-jour.

I am not an expert, and certainly welcome others opinions, but I was convinced
by the above arguement about a year ago and have been setting up software raids
since.  I would sacrifice performance for stability, especially since my bet is
that the performance hit is not so bad.

-- 
Marco