Re: [gentoo-amd64] Upgrading to Raid

[Francisco Perez <fperez@albrookdata.com>]

Scott,
I have a 3Ware Escalade 4 chaneel hardware raid controller running raid 
10.  Here are my thoughts:  The card itself was $175.00 and the 4 250GB 
brives were $150 bucks a piece, so the cost is considerable.  If you are 
only going to have two disks mirrored, you can get the two channel card 
and two drives and mirror them which is obviously less money.  My system 
is a Tyan Transport GX-28 with 2 Opteron 246's and originally I had the 
drives on the onboard controller.  First, there is a very noticable 
increase in performance going from the integrated (software) raid 
controller to the hardware raid controller.  For my percieved needs it 
was definitely worth the money.  Second, its a nice reassurance to know 
that if a drive (or even two drives) fails the hardware controller can 
restore the array by popping in a new disk without me having to do 
much...I'm not sure if this is the case with the integrated or linux 
raid.  With the hardware controller, if I wanted a bit more storage 
space, I could have chosen to make a raid five array, something that as 
far as I know is unavailable in both integrated and Linux array (at 
least now without a significant performance hit.)  Hope that helps.

Frank

scotthathcock@comcast.net wrote:
> I currently have an ASUS K8V Deluxe system with an 80GB SATA drive. It
> used to have a old 10GB PATA disk for M$ dual boot. That disk died and
> was interfering with boot, so it's in the trash. 
> 
> The dead disk reminded me of the pain I will suffer if I loose my linux
> system. Even with backups of my home dir, which I'm not as good about as
> I should be, a full fresh install would be a pain. Thus, I am
> considering Raid.
> 
> Does anyone have experience with RAID on this Board? 
> Is the Via or Promise controller better for this? 
> Is there a good Howto on migrating from a non Raid disk to Raid? I
> recall seeing one but can't find it now.
> Am I wasting time and money? Should I just do a better job of backup? Is
> there a resource on what to backup to allow a fast regeneration (or
> duplication) of an existing gentoo system?
> 
> Finally, thanks for the great distribution. I use a commercial distro at
> work and I am much happier with Gentoo. :)
> 
> Scott
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