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Linux Software RAID 5

A

Asgorath

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 12, 2004
Messages
1,253
I am deciding on whether I should go with a hardware RAID5 controller such as the LSI MEGARAID SATA 150-6 or if I should save the money and do a software RAID5. I realize that linux does a great software RAID, but I don't know all of the specifics...

If a drive fails, how will I know?

Can this support a hotspare?

How do I know which of the drives failed?

My main concern is reliability. My second concern is saving money. Any tips, suggestions, useful nudges?

Thanks,

Greg
 
If a drive fails, how will I know?
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mdadm can be set to send emails ever X minutes until an array is fixed. You can also just do `cat /proc/mdstat` and see the status of all your arrays.... building this you can write a small script to automatically check and do something if there is a failure. A healthy array will read [4/4], a degraded array will read [4/3] (assuming 4 drive array).

Can this support a hotspare?
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mdadm supports hotspares. If you have multiple arrays you can also have a single hotspare for all the arrays.

How do I know which of the drives failed?
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As far as I know, there is no feature to get the leds on the bad drive to blink (like some hardware cards do)... however, IMO just be careful how you connect your drives. Your mobo should have each sata port labeled 'sata1' 'sata2' and so on.... if you just connect the drives in order, your top drive will be /dev/sda, the one below /dev/sdb, and so on. It should be easy to check to see what drive failed and easily find the pysical drive you need to pull. Maybe there is some way to get he leds to flash though, I've never looked.

My main concern is reliability. My second concern is saving money. Any tips, suggestions, useful nudges?
Click to expand...
Well I trust software raid with my data. I'd recomment trying EVMS as it makes things easy and will stop you from destroying your array by accident. I'd also recommend just getting the harddrives first, putting them in a software array and test it out for yourslef. If you like it great, if not order a hardware card.

mdadm lets you mark drives bad to simulate a drive failure, or you can just unplug one I guess... but you can see exactly what will happen in the event of a failure. You can test out email notifications, see what kind of logs are generated, test how to add a new drive, make a rebuild starts if you have a hotspare and so on. This is all something I'd recommend doing even with a hardware raid card.

--edit to fix quoting and fix some (not all) english errors--
 
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