Re: Hardware RAID or OS RAID?

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Most raid adapters have management utilties to reconfigure/manage the arrays
and the card itself. Does not Adaptec have the Storage Manager utility?

"geek-y-guy" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23IuQ0nNlIHA.5820@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi All: I have built up a number of 1U servers that have always had some
flavor of Adaptec controller chip on the mobo, allowing me to configure
RAID0, 1 or 5 in BIOS, and usually I will set up a mirrored array in BIOS
and walk away for a few years <g>. Call me lucky but I haven't had a
single U320 SCSI or even any SATA drives fail yet...powersupplies seem to
die faster than drives in 1U servers.

But, the one limitation of BIOS-controlled RAID mirrors is that if a drive
fails, one needs to shutdown, swap in a new drive, reboot to bios and
rebuild the array. I've experimented with Server2003 mirroring on some
testbed servers and haven't had any problems with that either (e.g. no
drives have failed yet <g>). My thought is that this will allow for
zero-downtime maintenance if swapping a failed mirror drive?

I need to set up some new production servers on Server 2008 Std and/or Web
(using SATA drives), and I'm not sure which way to go for a mirrored boot
array...should I continue to use a BIOS-controlled array or go with
OS-controlled mirror? I haven't seen any "real" real-world analysis of
what (if any) impact on performance OS-based RAID has vs. BIOS-based RAID?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.



.

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