Hardware vs software raid

[Preston Hagar]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 5:59 PM, Mat Cantin <mat at cantinbrothers.ca> wrote:
>> + Preston Hagar <prestonh at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> I have had too many headaches with hardware RAID failues (with PERC
>>>
>>> cards, Areaca cards, 3ware cards, and Adaptec cards) to really go
>>> through the stress anymore.  If I have one of those cards, I will
>>> typically just use it as pass-through/JBOD and then do software RAID,
>>> although that can even present a problem.
>>
>>
>>>  Again though, most of my setups are small business, with a handful of
>>> servers, not large setups, so I could see it being different for a large
>>> business.
>>
>>
>
> I also mostly deal with small businesses and I typically always go for a
> linux software RAID when I can. I've mostly used a hardware RAID card with
> pass-through as you mentioned, but from your comments it seems that you use
> something else if given the choice?
>
> As a general question, when there aren't enough SATA ports on the
> motherboard, what hardware do people generally use when setting up a
> software RAID in a server?
>
> matoc
>

If there aren't enough on-board SATA slots, I tend to favor fairly
generic SATA controller cards with the SIL3124 chipset from Silicon
Image (or there is an updated chipset for PCI-E cards, I'll have to
look it up).  It is really well supported in Linux and has been for
quite a while.  As long as you can determine that they have that
chipset, even some of the cheaper boards, like Syba for instance work
well.  If you go to Silicon Image's website:

http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=27&cat=15&os=0

You can download "base" BIOS files for the cards (the ones that start
with b) that remove the crummy fake raid from the card and basically
just present the drives like regular drives plugged into the
motherboard.  Depending on your needs, these cards (or a lot of them
at least, since it is easy to saturate the PCI bus) may not give you
the highest performance, but for most applications I find that it is
more than sufficient (I have it setup on Zoneminder camera servers,
Samba servers, NFS file servers, among other things).  It just might
not be best for say putting a database on.

Hope this helps.

Preston