Hardware Raid?

I would buy a good hardware Raid card use hardware RAID. If you have good components, nothings beats that. I would not recommend using cheap RAID hardware because it will fail when you do not expect.
 
We are using Software Raid on our few servers. Software raid is working fine. We didn't face any performance issue on Software RAID yet.
 
This is a good question. Don't write off software RAID so fast. With today's CPUs software raid can out perform hardware raid. And hardware RAID can be a liabilty. For example, suppose your RAID controller goes out and the RAID data is stored on the card. You will need to find the exact same card to bring the system back up. This could mean searching ebay for a couple days. With software RAID you can move the drives to another box

So with software raid you can save a lot of money, recover faster and avoid vendor lock-ins

Unlike with hardware raid you can mix disk sizes and types (ide, sata, scsi)

SSD drives run faster on software RAID - the good RAID cards will disable a drives private cache that is needed by SSD drives. (Disabling a drive's private cache will cause data loss if there is a power failure)

Perhaps a mix of the two is best. Use hardware for / or c:/ and software raid for the bulk storage
 
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Tuxxin said:
I ran a server with software raid 5. The motherboard went out and I wasn't able to recover data.
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Technically, in your case, that is not software raid since raid is being managed by your bios. Its like a cheap raid card. Some people call it FakeRAID. Even if you were using true hardware raid and the raid card went down and you could not find an exact replacement you would be in the same position

With software raid, raid is managed by the OS and is hardware independent. Thus if your motherboard goes down you just need to replace the motherboard or move the disks to a new box. Software RAID is built into the Windows OS (Windows Server). For Linux you can download and install mdadm.
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I just want to add that I have had no problems with software raid1. I have read horror stories about data loss due to hardware raid controllers going bad. With software raid its very simple to replace a failing drive. I have never experienced any data loss when software raid was used. Of course my experience is limited.
 
HW raid is another point of failure. If you don't monitor hardware raid status proactively, then you may face sudden hardware failure issue. With Software raid you can monitor your raid status easily, where hw raid monitoring setup is not easy.
 
There are some advantages of software raid over to hardware raid in terms of special hardware and cost. But hardware raid is more reliable than software raid as it do not uses the server resources.
 
ExonHost said:
HW raid is another point of failure. If you don't monitor hardware raid status proactively, then you may face sudden hardware failure issue. With Software raid you can monitor your raid status easily, where hw raid monitoring setup is not easy.
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Yes that's the way I felt. mdadm will email me if a drive is kicked out of the array.

I personally think that if you need that extra little bit of performance from a hardware raid then you are probably close to overloading the server anyway.

I think there are pros and cons to each and each person needs to decide for themselves which one they want.
 
A hardware RAID has its own processor and memory to
run the RAID application. Its like independent system dedicated to the RAID application
 
I've seen far too many issues with raid in the past. Use a proper backup system, your accounts will be restored in half the time it takes to get the raid array back up, just from my own experience.
 
wh-coach said:
If you're going to buy a RAID card, do you get two (i.e. in case the card is no longer made by the time it dies and you can't source a second?)... Would you just stick with software RAID and leave it at that? Other?
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If you can afford you a really good raid cards then you need to purchase N+1 at least, where N is your servers count :) if one of yours will be gone or/and unavailable to purchase anymore you need to have it on hand.

And if you can't buy good ones I think that software raid is a good deal then.

One mention: never connect SSD drives to cheap RAID cards! Ever!
I'd suddenly noticed that my SSD can get me much more IOPS without 'megaraid' card for example! :)
 
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