Supermicro RAID card

Mercutio

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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ddrueding said:
Seconded. No RAID, just eight ports. Merc should love it.
Click to expand...

I love SATA ports, but if I had PCI-X slots on something I wouldn't be bothering with a board that can only handle eight of them.

And yes, I'm still smarter than you for having arrays that I can actually recover in the event of a controller failure.
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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As do I. And a substantial amount on tape. But it'd still be a tragedy to lose years of data because one card won't resync my array because it's .2 revisions off from the original hardware. Screw that. SoftRAID give me what I need.
 
ddrueding

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You don't lose anything, you just restore from backup. This is the part of your position that I don't understand. Here is my example setup:

I have a RAID-0 array and a RAID-6 array. They each contain the same information. Therefore my information is stored in two locations, one of them having added redundancy which we will ignore for now.

I still have 2 complete copies of my information. If the building with the RAID-0 (of WDs ;)) burned to the ground, I would lose nothing.

The total number of drives I need to achieve this is 2n+2, where n is the capacity I actually need. In my case n is 4, so I need 10 drives.

Assuming you only keep two copies of your data, you have almost as much redundancy as I do, using almost as many drives as I do.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but a controller failure wont slow me down very much.
 
Handruin

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I know this is aside from the main point, but what do you do to keep the two in synch?
 
Handruin

Handruin

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Also, for those or you with redundant controllers for your array, couldn't you do a preemptive failure test and swap controllers with test data on the array to confirm that if one fails, you can recover with the other controller card? If that works, I would feel even that much more assured that there wouldn't be an issue. Granted it means more work, but I've done the same tactic with database backups to ensure that they can be restored.
 
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I have more than two identical Dell Perc 6/i controller cards all with the same FW. I didn't go so far as to move the array from one to the other and try it, but I'm confident it will work. I did try that with the two Dell Perc 5/i cards and my previous 6 drive RAID-5 array. It moved between the cards perfectly.
 
MaxBurn

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I also have experience that with 3Ware and Intel you can move arrays to different machines and even go up a revision in hardware without issue.

It is a legit concern to be aware of though, but I think I would be more concerned that a failing controller would destroy/corrupt the data on the drives anyway.

With a good backup strategy I am not sure I would be concerned at all, just restore to whatever you replaced the dead stuff with.
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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ddrueding said:
You don't lose anything, you just restore from backup.
Click to expand...

The important point for me is that I can be utterly unconcerned with where I'm getting my SATA ports. On my file servers, there are a mix of 3ware, Dell, Intel and JMicron controllers. Linux doesn't care what the underlying disk controller is. I don't have to depend on having another Dell or 3ware card available to make my drives go, as long as I can plug all the drives in to the same physical computer.

Having lived through the hell of not being able to resync an array because of a slight controller change, I'm happy to leave that crap behind.
 
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Stereodude

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I think you're overly paranoid. :errr:

I was able to move a RAID-1 array from my motherboard's ICH9R controller to a Perc 5/i today and maintain the data (though I wasn't interested in doing so).
 
MaxBurn

MaxBurn

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Stereodude said:
I think you're overly paranoid. :errr:

I was able to move a RAID-1 array from my motherboard's ICH9R controller to a Perc 5/i today and maintain the data (though I wasn't interested in doing so).
Click to expand...

I think you can expect that from RAID-1 anywhere. Wouldn't have worked with RAID-5 though even assuming both controllers supported it.

I was also pleased to confirm that when I broke my ICH9R RAID-1 array it didn't loose data either, despite the ton of warnings and confirmations that it would.
 
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