[ILUG] Why RAID

[Paul Mc Auley]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 12:32:18PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:

| Reading about all the problems with RAID,
| I wonder why people bother with it?
| Is it worth the hassle?

It depends. If you are in a business environment, hardware RAID is
definitely worth it. Having a system able to deliver speed and/or
resilience for disks without bothering the OS too much is definitely
worth having.

I'm a little less enthusiastic about soft RAID. While you can get some
of the benefits of hard RAID that way, I tend to feel it's a bit less
likely to recover from a serious disk failure, and doing stuff in the
main CPU rather than on a dedicated controller is going to generate
overheads.

That said, the sort of servers that do RAID properly are generally more
suited to a data centre environment than a domestic one. Or in other
words: You pay your money and you take your choice.
	Paul