Re: Hardware RAID or OS RAID?

geek-y-guy wrote:
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.


Avoid software RAID at all costs, especially if you already have hardware RAID available. We had a vendor set up a software RAID array (I wasn't knowledgeable enough at the time to object). A year later, one of the hard drives failed AND WE LOST ALL THE DATA!!!

Stick with the hardware RAID.....

--

Regards,
Hank Arnold
Microsoft MVP
Windows Server - Directory Services
.

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