Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea

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beowulf7

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I came across this interesting article titled, Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea. What do you think about it? I've copied and pasted the introduction below. Click on that link to read the rest of the article. He also compared Seagate and Western Digital hard drives in terms of reliability based on his company's data. These 2 things (RAID vs. no RAID and Seagate vs. WD) might generate some discussion.

Jon Bach said:
Introduction

As president of Puget Custom Computers, I get a unique perspective on computer products and technology. Our company specializes in selling high performance custom computers, and that naturally brings up the question of RAID often. There is an overwhelming opinion out there that if you have the money and want a blazing fast and stable computer, that you should put your hard drives in RAID. We have known for years that this perception is just flat out wrong, but the problem is that the idea is so widely accepted that it is nearly impossible to convince our customers otherwise. In fact, if we try too hard to talk them out of it, we end up losing the sale! So, should we be selling configurations that we know are flawed, for the sake of making the sale? To be honest, if it comes down to it we will, but not without a fight! This article is just the latest effort in educating the public about RAID.

To be clear, there are definitely times when RAID is a good route. I will get into that later, but I need to start by saying that I am not talking about enterprise servers. That is a completely different type of computer. I am talking about home desktops, enthusiast computers, and professional workstations.

...
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D-bag!

Is he really applying this to all RAID types? Tell me he's not.

EDIT: Whoops, saw the rest of the article and he goes through each type.
 
Interesting.
I estimate that anywhere from 25% to 30% of our customers with RAID will call us at some point in the first year to report a degraded RAID array or problem directly resulting from their RAID configuration. Granted, a failed RAID1 array does not mean data loss, but it certainly means a long, frustrating hassle.
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From his point of view, I can see what he's thinking. It's a pain to support raid 1 arrays, because they can become degraded. But that has nothing to do with losing data on raid 1 arrays. If your data is important, dealing with hassles with it is a small cost to pay compared to losing your data. It's a straw man argument - nobody (as far as I know, anyways) is advocating raid arrays as being easier to administrate than single disks (at least in terms of maintainence; some argue that raid arrays are easier to keep track of files on).

In other words, good for him, but don't go looking for me to break any arrays any time soon.
 
Is there really that much of a difference between MB RAID controllers and PCI RAID controllers? What are the differences?
 
It's not a very good article. He does make an attempt to make a case. However, he doesn't talk about availability (I can still use my system when a drive fails in a RAID-1) and his backup advice isn't that smart. Let's see, I backup to the USB device and then when lightning hits near my house or there is an electric surge, it's pretty much all gone. HIs problem with RAID-1 is that he gets support calls, not that it is a bad thing to do. He talks about his numbers and how he doesn't have them for the RAID-1 arrays, but then he throws them out. He doesn't talk about what customers call and why they call. He talks about not using RAID-1 because it avoids a frustrating issue, but he doesn't define that and is it frurstrating to his customer or to his techs? Someone saying that RAID-1 on the desktop is bad is not painting an accurate picture. To pretty much anyone, 3% is going to be too high.

In terms of RAID-0 he has a point. His frustration is that he can say that he told them so, but he can. He can include documentation with the machine when people get this type of setup to explain the risks and the needs for data backup. He could be upselling a storage raid to go along with someone using a RAID-0 configuration.

He builds high end customer computers but won't talk RAID-10? Why not? He also lumps RAID-5 and RAID-0 together for people who need a lot of storage. Two entirely different things. He doesn't really seperate backups well from RAID.

The point he should be pushing in the end is the customer is probably better off with a single faster drive for OS and EVERYONE should have a backup. He makes some halfs points and throws in some half truths, but really shouldn't publish that article.
 
general said:
It's not a very good article. He does make an attempt to make a case. However, he doesn't talk about availability (I can still use my system when a drive fails in a RAID-1) and his backup advice isn't that smart. Let's see, I backup to the USB device and then when lightning hits near my house or there is an electric surge, it's pretty much all gone. HIs problem with RAID-1 is that he gets support calls, not that it is a bad thing to do. He talks about his numbers and how he doesn't have them for the RAID-1 arrays, but then he throws them out. He doesn't talk about what customers call and why they call. He talks about not using RAID-1 because it avoids a frustrating issue, but he doesn't define that and is it frurstrating to his customer or to his techs? Someone saying that RAID-1 on the desktop is bad is not painting an accurate picture. To pretty much anyone, 3% is going to be too high.

In terms of RAID-0 he has a point. His frustration is that he can say that he told them so, but he can. He can include documentation with the machine when people get this type of setup to explain the risks and the needs for data backup. He could be upselling a storage raid to go along with someone using a RAID-0 configuration.

He builds high end customer computers but won't talk RAID-10? Why not? He also lumps RAID-5 and RAID-0 together for people who need a lot of storage. Two entirely different things. He doesn't really seperate backups well from RAID.

The point he should be pushing in the end is the customer is probably better off with a single faster drive for OS and EVERYONE should have a backup. He makes some halfs points and throws in some half truths, but really shouldn't publish that article.
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I see what you're saying. I thought he did make some good points but probably glazed over certain things, perhaps to keep the article short enough to be readable in just a few minutes without turning into a dissertation.

The main point that he or anyone else writing about RAID should drive home is that RAID is not an alternative to having a data backup mechanism. Perhaps it can be used in conjunction with that. To quote Xnarg from SlickDeals.net:
[RAID is] just fine until:

The one controller to which they are connected fails;
There's a lightning strike, power surge;
The CPU, motherboard, or memory fails, causing data corruption;
The PSU fries the components (I've seen PCs w/ smoke pouring out of them);
A program corrupts data;
Data are accidentally overwritten or deleted;
A thief, vandal, water leak, fire, etc. destroys the system;
etc.
Click to expand...
 
I read it, and I agree with most nearly everything he says in the article.

Earlier today I was reading some post here from someone that just built a machine and put 4 x 320GB drive in a RAID5 setup in it, and I was like: "WTF man, just keep the drives seperate, my god." I know what RAID is, been using it since long before a "RAID" chip ever appeared on an IDE-based mobo (SCSI ftw!!!) and even now, I say this to people:

[/i]If you are not doing high end digital video editing - the most resource and hard drive intensive activity that modern day computers and the hard drive powered storage subsystems that power them are used for - then you simply have no need for RAID of any rating or classification.[/i]

You don't, period. That is the only true usage for such things because that's the primary reason for RAID from a performance perspective.

If you're looking for having a "safe" system with redundancy, then get some damned setup with mirroring capability, aka RAID "1" and go from there.

But just slapping 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 or more drives (and some people do it) in a machine and then feeling good about it to me just means you gave yourself a 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 time better chance of something going wrong, even with redundancy and parity to keep things running along as necessary.

It's more trouble than it's worth, in my opinion, which this post is basically comprised of. I never recommend RAID setups, ever, and whenever someone simply must have it, I let them handle it as I won't be party to dealing with it then having to support it after I'm done building their "Godbox" for them.

It ain't about the money, it's about the headaches the "boutique" clients create for me after I'm done, especially when I know they'll call me to help fix the problems that inevitably occur anyway.

"Mo' money, mo' money, mo' money..." :p
 
How is this different then a SINGLE drive?

[RAID is] just fine until:

The one controller to which they are connected fails;
There's a lightning strike, power surge;
The CPU, motherboard, or memory fails, causing data corruption;
The PSU fries the components (I've seen PCs w/ smoke pouring out of them);
A program corrupts data;
Data are accidentally overwritten or deleted;
A thief, vandal, water leak, fire, etc. destroys the system;
etc.
Click to expand...


Most people think RAID-0 is going to magically increase their FPS or some shit, it won't - I understand stuff like that... usually raid is to much for home consumer... but the above points apply if you have raid or a single drive.

Secondly, for something like a home file server it won't be a bad idea to have RAID1 or RAID5. Not saying most users need it, but if you store a lot of personal data a mirror couldn't hurt.

Regardless of RAID or the lack of it, backs up should still be performed onto another media.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
You don't, period. That is the only true usage for such things because that's the primary reason for RAID from a performance perspective.
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RAID is a perfectly fine uptime tool, even if performance (as in read/ write speed) is not a primary concern.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
If you are not doing high end digital video editing - the most resource and hard drive intensive activity that modern day computers and the hard drive powered storage subsystems that power them are used for - then you simply have no need for RAID of any rating or classification.
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Bullshit. There are plenty of applications that warrant the use of raid of some sort. Just because your customers don't encounter them doesn't mean you should ignore a proven-good strategy when you do encounter a use for it.
bbz_Ghost said:
But just slapping 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 or more drives (and some people do it) in a machine and then feeling good about it to me just means you gave yourself a 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 time better chance of something going wrong, even with redundancy and parity to keep things running along as necessary.
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How does the failure rate of an 8 drive raid 5 array compare to the failure rate of 8 drives? Do the math. If one drive fails from the individual drives, you lose data, right then and there. If one drive fails from the raid 5 array, you pop in another one and no data is lost. If multiple drives fail in either scenario, you lose data. So in one instance raid 5 is better, and in no instances is it worse. Sounds like a win to me.

I'm not saying raid is a replacement for keeping backups - not by a long shot. But it's better than nothing, no matter what your opinion.
bbz_Ghost said:
It's more trouble than it's worth, in my opinion, which this post is basically comprised of. I never recommend RAID setups, ever, and whenever someone simply must have it, I let them handle it as I won't be party to dealing with it then having to support it after I'm done building their "Godbox" for them.
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Okay. But just because you don't want to deal with the support doesn't mean it's never a good idea.

To clarify a bit, I have no grudge with those who are un-recommending raid 0 for gaming boxes. But for large data storage for the home user on a budget, raid 5 is possibly the best choice out there right now. Dismissing it with "well, it's kind of like raid 0" in the article was disingenuous at best.
 
I won't build a box for anyone that is even semi-important without
1) Talking to them about backups (even if it's just their "my documents" folder to a usb key)
2) Talking to them about Raid1.

2-4 Hardware raid1 (3ware for example) IDE or SATA controllers are sub $150. Most desktop useres, IMHO are much better off getting an e6300 or pentium-d box & hardware raid instead of an e6600.

A good example: My father who refuses to upgrade unless something is "broken".

He has a 120G drive that is probably 3-4 years old (have to check manufacturing date to be sure). I set him up with an older 3ware ($110 at newegg last i checked) raid1 ide card and sold him another drive. He runs his business on this machine that he works 60 hours per week at. This is an athlon xp-2500 btw, not exactly fast, however he needs RELIABLE.

I did the following:
1) Hardware firewall (OpenBSD/pf with default block rule for outbound traffic) in a real-time failover configuration. Dual internet connections (cable/dsl). Firewall also has failover DHCP and failover DNS.
2) No outlook installed.
3) Turn off all active/x javascript etc as well, as 90% of his web browsing is hotmail & ebay. I believe we permit it for hotmail. I have permitted it for "trusted sites" and have shown him how to do this for websites that "don't work". The internet zone has no active scripting allowed, period.
4) No games or extra software.
5) I have the raid controller e-mail me if it goes into a degraded state. I am going to be setting up snmp monitoring for this in the next 6 months as well as SNMP monitoring for the lan.
6) I have an anti-virus program that runs/updates automatically.
7) I have shown him how to run anti-spyware stuff, which I walk him through every 2 weeks or so.
8) I have setup internal dns servers which are "authoritative" for all hosts in this hosts file:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
9) I have taught him to run the basic anti-spyware stuff

In the last 4 years he has had basically 0 unplanned downtime.
 
realy poor artikel, his only argument on raid 1s is "Keep in mind, RAID1 does nothing to protect you from: blabla" and "get yourself an external SATA or USB hard drive, and run a scheduled backup."

and on raid 0 "Go into your research with the knowledge that it is actually very uncommon for RAID0 to be faster in desktop usage."

I so disagree with his artikel.

My setup is 2xraptor 74g for windows and games in raid 0
rest of stuff like photos, project files, mp3s, etc are on a 2x250gb in raid 1

and guess what, its the best setup you can ever get on a gaming rig. The 2 raptors are VERY fast and it helps a lot when loading up windows, opening browser, loading games, etc. While all the Important data like bookmarks, emails, specific programms/settings are saved on the 250gb raid 1 system, totally save.

In my opinion raid is highly underrated and Im happy to see it getting more and more common in gaming rigs (sata and raid controllers onboard). Its a waste to spend thousands of dollars for a dual SLI system while you only have a crappy 7200rpm HDD.


*Sorry for bad spelling/gramma
 
turnschuh said:
realy poor artikel, his only argument on raid 1s is "Keep in mind, RAID1 does nothing to protect you from: blabla" and "get yourself an external SATA or USB hard drive, and run a scheduled backup."

and on raid 0 "Go into your research with the knowledge that it is actually very uncommon for RAID0 to be faster in desktop usage."

I so disagree with his artikel.

My setup is 2xraptor 74g for windows and games in raid 0
rest of stuff like photos, project files, mp3s, etc are on a 2x250gb in raid 1

and guess what, its the best setup you can ever get on a gaming rig. The 2 raptors are VERY fast and it helps a lot when loading up windows, opening browser, loading games, etc. While all the Important data like bookmarks, emails, specific programms/settings are saved on the 250gb raid 1 system, totally save.

In my opinion raid is highly underrated and Im happy to see it getting more and more common in gaming rigs (sata and raid controllers onboard). Its a waste to spend thousands of dollars for a dual SLI system while you only have a crappy 7200rpm HDD.


*Sorry for bad spelling/gramma
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Openoffice is free if you want help with the spelling. Not sure if their grammar checker is any good (I'm not complaining, just offering...)

I'm sure most people think My box is silly with 8G of ram dual opteron 285's (4 cores) and a single 7800GT, but gaming occupies less than 5% of my time...It's all what you use your box for. As I grow older (been building boxes since I was 15 or so and I'll be 32 in october), i game less.
 
Robstar said:
Openoffice is free if you want help with the spelling. Not sure if their grammar checker is any good (I'm not complaining, just offering...)
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Firefox has a spell checker as well. Both in German and English. I think that the Turnschuh's native tongue is not English, given that his nick is German for ``Sneaker'/ Athletic Shoe'.

On topic: I am just about to upgrade my mom's PC. Since she will be using a couple of older HDD's , I am considering to put her OS on RAID-1, so that it'll keep working through a drive failure, since I won't be around -most likely- when this will happen.
 
drizzt81 said:
Firefox has a spell checker as well. Both in German and English. I think that the Turnschuh's native tongue is not English, given that his nick is German for ``Sneaker'/ Athletic Shoe'.

On topic: I am just about to upgrade my mom's PC. Since she will be using a couple of older HDD's , I am considering to put her OS on RAID-1, so that it'll keep working through a drive failure, since I won't be around -most likely- when this will happen.
Click to expand...

Very similar to what I did for my dad.
 
budec said:
How is this different then a SINGLE drive?

< Xnarg's points>

...
Click to expand...

You're right, it's no different than the problems a single (obviously non-RAID'ed) drive would have. But that was Xnarg's point that pair of RAID-1 disks still has those same problems that a single HDD would have.
 
Robstar said:
I won't build a box for anyone that is even semi-important without
1) Talking to them about backups (even if it's just their "my documents" folder to a usb key)
2) Talking to them about Raid1.

2-4 Hardware raid1 (3ware for example) IDE or SATA controllers are sub $150. Most desktop useres, IMHO are much better off getting an e6300 or pentium-d box & hardware raid instead of an e6600.

A good example: My father who refuses to upgrade unless something is "broken".

He has a 120G drive that is probably 3-4 years old (have to check manufacturing date to be sure). I set him up with an older 3ware ($110 at newegg last i checked) raid1 ide card and sold him another drive. He runs his business on this machine that he works 60 hours per week at. This is an athlon xp-2500 btw, not exactly fast, however he needs RELIABLE.

I did the following:
1) Hardware firewall (OpenBSD/pf with default block rule for outbound traffic) in a real-time failover configuration. Dual internet connections (cable/dsl). Firewall also has failover DHCP and failover DNS.
2) No outlook installed.
3) Turn off all active/x javascript etc as well, as 90&#37; of his web browsing is hotmail & ebay. I believe we permit it for hotmail. I have permitted it for "trusted sites" and have shown him how to do this for websites that "don't work". The internet zone has no active scripting allowed, period.
4) No games or extra software.
5) I have the raid controller e-mail me if it goes into a degraded state. I am going to be setting up snmp monitoring for this in the next 6 months as well as SNMP monitoring for the lan.
6) I have an anti-virus program that runs/updates automatically.
7) I have shown him how to run anti-spyware stuff, which I walk him through every 2 weeks or so.
8) I have setup internal dns servers which are "authoritative" for all hosts in this hosts file:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
9) I have taught him to run the basic anti-spyware stuff

In the last 4 years he has had basically 0 unplanned downtime.
Click to expand...

You set up your Dad's PC pretty well. Congrats on that! :cool: IMO, for very good reliability (however you want to define "very good" as), use RAID1 with a good controller (probably not the motherboard's) along with a tested and verified data backup and retrieval solution. If one can only do one or the other for whatever reason, the latter is far important.

Robstar said:
Openoffice is free if you want help with the spelling. Not sure if their grammar checker is any good (I'm not complaining, just offering...)

I'm sure most people think My box is silly with 8G of ram dual opteron 285's (4 cores) and a single 7800GT, but gaming occupies less than 5% of my time...It's all what you use your box for. As I grow older (been building boxes since I was 15 or so and I'll be 32 in october), i game less.
Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat. I'll also be 32 this year and have gamed a lot less since I was in middle school and high school. My gaming has almost come to a standstill since the early 2000s - other than the occasional Minesweeper. I build a nice PC about 1.5 years ago thinking I can have some fun gaming, but just can't seem to find the time. And now with a new house and a yard to maintain, my time will be even more limited. :(
 
Don't frown. Too many people waste time on that stuff and don't take the time to live.
 
Dual internet connections (cable/dsl).
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Nice. How you set that up? Is it fail over or multi-homed? Is there a guide or documents any where that tells how to setup this up? (I'm familiar with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I just don't know how to setup dual consumer connections.)
 
That article is really just arguing against that onboard sata RAID junk. He arguments don't apply to real controllers and for user who know what they are doing, not for real software RAID either.
 
uOpt said:
That article is really just arguing against that onboard sata RAID junk. He arguments don't apply to real controllers and for user who know what they are doing, not for real software RAID either.
Click to expand...


most onoard RAID is junk. I would agree there.
 
I assume no one here advocates using RAID-1 as an alternative to a data backup solution. When I first was building my computer (2005), I thought about using RAID-1 for that purpose, until people told me it's a poor choice. So I manually clone my HDD to another HDD periodically to make backups. I should make incremental backups more often; I know. :eek:
 
beowulf7 said:
I assume no one here advocates using RAID-1 as an alternative to a data backup solution. When I first was building my computer (2005), I thought about using RAID-1 for that purpose, until people told me it's a poor choice. So I manually clone my HDD to another HDD periodically to make backups. I should make incremental backups more often; I know. :eek:
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Right.

The problem is simple: most mirroring mechanisms leave you with a bad backup if you primary disk crashes while the backup is in progress.
 
uOpt said:
Right.

The problem is simple: most mirroring mechanisms leave you with a bad backup if you primary disk crashes while the backup is in progress.
Click to expand...

Well, that, and also if one hard drive contains bad data (e.g. deleted an important file, virus, spyware, etc.), the RAID controller will simultaneously write that bad data (or delete good data) from the other HDD.
 
budec said:
Nice. How you set that up? Is it fail over or multi-homed? Is there a guide or documents any where that tells how to setup this up? (I'm familiar with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I just don't know how to setup dual consumer connections.)
Click to expand...

without straying too far from the topic....of this thread:

2 boxes, each with 4 nic ports
nic port 1 on each box goes into a switch that connects to dsl bridge
nic port 2 on each box goes into a switch that connects to cable bridge
nic port 3 on each box goes into a switch that connects to natted lan
nic port 4 on each box goes into a switch that has only pfsync ports

On each interface except 4, I have carp setup. Pfsync synchronizes states in real time.

I use route-to in pf to throw web/https traffic to cable. Everything else goes over dsl. ftp goes through ftp-proxy (which AFAIK does not support route-to).

if one box falls over (or I have to do a kernel recompile & reboot) all states are already mirrored on failover firewall. My next customization is that upon failure of the dsl or cable connection itself, to re-write the ruleset. This is not done yet, but should be soon. The other option instead of doing that is doing round-robin with route-to. I have not decided which I am going to do.

Since my dsl also has a routed /29, Im thinking of adding a 5th nic interface on each box and setting up carp to have a dmz.
 
beowulf7 said:
You set up your Dad's PC pretty well. Congrats on that! :cool: IMO, for very good reliability (however you want to define "very good" as), use RAID1 with a good controller (probably not the motherboard's) along with a tested and verified data backup and retrieval solution. If one can only do one or the other for whatever reason, the latter is far important.



I'm in the same boat. I'll also be 32 this year and have gamed a lot less since I was in middle school and high school. My gaming has almost come to a standstill since the early 2000s - other than the occasional Minesweeper. I build a nice PC about 1.5 years ago thinking I can have some fun gaming, but just can't seem to find the time. And now with a new house and a yard to maintain, my time will be even more limited. :(
Click to expand...

I really have never had luck with onbaord raid. Dad's pc has a 3ware 7506 IIRC. Backup/fileserver setup is in progress with freebsd 6.2, dual athlon mp's, 12 hot swap sata bays 2 * lsi logic 64-bit 66mhz pci controllers running in the appropriate slots on the motherboard. Then getting automatic backups running every x hours/days in accordance with what is acceptable to pops should do the trick. teaching him how to recover a file without asking me is the next trick (and the toughest!).
 
Robstar said:
I really have never had luck with onbaord raid. Dad's pc has a 3ware 7506 IIRC. Backup/fileserver setup is in progress with freebsd 6.2, dual athlon mp's, 12 hot swap sata bays 2 * lsi logic 64-bit 66mhz pci controllers running in the appropriate slots on the motherboard. Then getting automatic backups running every x hours/days in accordance with what is acceptable to pops should do the trick. teaching him how to recover a file without asking me is the next trick (and the toughest!).
Click to expand...

I hear you. I can't think of how many times I've shown my father how to burn a DVD or CD and he still calls me up for "tech support" where I have to walk him through Nero. And he's an engineer. I blame it on the generation gap, where it's intuitive for some who grew up w/ that tech and not for others who didn't grow up w/ it.
 
After the nightmare that was the p5w dh "ez-raid" i'm currently mirroring my storage drive manually. It sure was easy to set up, but no one told me it would destroy the raid1 and completely brick one of the drives if i disconnected the cables. and the only way to possibly set it back up is to reinstall the os. If i ever build myslf another system i'm going with a motherboard with the least amount of useless features.
 
B737Capt said:
Is there really that much of a difference between MB RAID controllers and PCI RAID controllers? What are the differences?
Click to expand...

A good quality add in board, (not the $30 or $50 cheapies), is generally better due to; better hardware offloading (reducing cpu usage), in many cases they have a cache which can increase speed in some cases, often have better software, can be replaced should it fail without losing your array(err, sometimes,well, more often than on board anyway without replacing your mobo), often have more ports, and often support more varieties of raid..

Your typical on board raid solutions, are not much of a step up from software raid imho..
 
drizzt81 said:
Unlike software raid solutions motherboard based ones `ought' to be OS independent.
Click to expand...

Not really. Most motherboard controllers are really doing the raid in software, so Linux (for example) recognizes them as "fakeraid". Windows is the only OS likely to have fakeraid drivers available, so the others miss out on the hugely stable, reliable, and feature-filled drivers.:p
 
rodsfree said:
3 words.....
Promise Linux Drivers

One of the most used on-board controllers, and their linux driver support sux.
Click to expand...

unhappy_mage said:
Not really. Most motherboard controllers are really doing the raid in software, so Linux (for example) recognizes them as "fakeraid". Windows is the only OS likely to have fakeraid drivers available, so the others miss out on the hugely stable, reliable, and feature-filled drivers.:p
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hence my use of the word `ought' which our British friend use to express what they expect the state of the world to be, even though they are aware that reality is likely different.
 
drizzt81 said:
hence my use of the word `ought' which our British friend use to express what they expect the state of the world to be, even though they are aware that reality is likely different.
Click to expand...

Well, software raid driver writers *ought* to standardize their on-disk format. Heck, even the hardware manufacturers could get in on it. Then every raid array could work everywhere. Allow for some manufacturer-specific data, and room to grow, but make the simple stuff work everywhere.

And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.
 
I've heard horror stories about nForce 4 RAID, but myself have never had an issue with it...I use a RAID0 array of 2x250GB Caviars.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Earlier today I was reading some post here from someone that just built a machine and put 4 x 320GB drive in a RAID5 setup in it, and I was like: "WTF man, just keep the drives seperate, my god." I know what RAID is, been using it since long before a "RAID" chip ever appeared on an IDE-based mobo (SCSI ftw!!!)
Click to expand...

Well since I happen to be running 4x320GB and 4x250GB drives in 2x RAID5s...

Personally, it's much easier to mount two logical drives (one for DVDs and the other for TV shows) than to mounting 8 individual drives and having a mess with regards to organization.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Well, software raid driver writers *ought* to standardize their on-disk format. Heck, even the hardware manufacturers could get in on it. Then every raid array could work everywhere. Allow for some manufacturer-specific data, and room to grow, but make the simple stuff work everywhere.

And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.
Click to expand...

There actually is a standard, but to my knowledge nobody obeys to it:
http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/ddftwg/
 
Well, there's only one standard here, and they deal with it using the third option :)

"The nice thing about Stan... -what was that thing named?"

I should probably hack support into FreeBSD just to claim first base.
 
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