[Gllug] A SATA Raid card worth having?

[John Hearns]

On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 00:38 +0000, Russell Howe wrote:

> I think this is the kind of thing you get with hardware RAID - all these
> things have been (or should have been!) thought about by the people who
> built it. There should be no I/O bottlenecks, the CPU in it should be
> fast enough to do what's needed, and for RAID boxes, things like
> cooling, hotswappable parts, modular design with replaceable fan modules
> for when fans die and other things like that can all make a difference.
> To develop something this polished by yourself, using software RAID as a
> base, is quite a challenge, and, I suspect, the hardware RAID may come
> out cheaper overall. It will also come with things like a warranty and a
> support telephone number :)
As someone who supports many hardware RAID units in the field,
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments above. Hot-swap PSUs, fans
and spare disks in the array are absolutely vital. Going a level above
that, you can have dual controllers in a fibre channel fabric, and
upgrade/swap one while the other is active.

Being tied into a manufacturer is in practice no problem. You can decide
what brand of disks to put in an array, and could change them all out.
What's wrong with fans/PSUs, enclosure from one vendor - I would guess
your servers are the same. How often in reality does anyone do a major
upgrade of a server? The IT industry moves rapidly, and by the time a
major upgrade is needed it is more cost effective to replace and
migrate, keeping the old one as a backup or repurposing it.
Same with RAID arrays. We are now commonly shipping arrays with SATA
drives and Ultra 320 controllers or fibre channel.
With 500 gig drives that's one heck of a lot of storage in a small size,
and with a lot of redundancy.
And besides, you get me to come along and scrounge coffee if it needs
some TLC.

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