[Ma-linux] Fwd: Re: NAS Box using software RAID

[Peter Teuben]

I'd like to share my recent experience with a RAID card.This one
handles 8 SATA drives and was my first RAID, using the cards
hardware options. I believe it's a 3ware 9000 Storage Controller.
Just a week or so ago noted one of the disks was bad, so decided
to use the raid-rebuild (this was RAID 5), but whatever i tried
in the menus, it was not rebuild.... perhaps a pilot error, so decided
to sstart from scratch and also use xfs instead of ext3.
I remember ext3 takes a long long time to mkfs, and xfs takes a
mere second, not even.

Now, here's the surprise for me: once the 8 drives have been
assigned, the firmware needs to initialize the raid. Mind you,this
is still before mkfs in linux,this is in the BIOS .... I've not understood
why this process needs to take 10+ hours.

Would I have been better off with software raid?

peter

On 07/12/2010 10:36 AM, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
> On 07/12/2010 08:48 AM, Jay Hart wrote:
>
>    
>> My plan is to use full amount of both drives in a RAID 5 configuration.  I
>> think this would work, but I'm not well versed on recovery using two drives.
>>      
> Nope, Raid5 requires at least three drives, sorry.
>
> What do you mean by 'recovery'? are you concerned with rebuilding the
> array after drive failures?
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