Re: Windows 2003 Raid controller question
- From: Leythos <void@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 07:47:15 -0400
In article <28020C2C-18A1-407E-8C15-CF17F6A78D85@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
tuktuk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
How reliable is Windows 2003 Raid? I have configured raid 1 using Windows
2003 raid on few servers and they have been working fine but read on this
news group not to use software raid. I had problem with one server where a
disk on raid 1 died and all I did was replaced that disk and configured raid
1 again, so thought its great... should I change to hardware raid or just
leave them as they are. the purpose of raid 1 is if 1 drive dies other should
keep you going. In fact I have problem with 1 hardware raid on intel mother
board, just wouldn't let me add another drive, crashing with blue screen.
Over the years, having used a combination of Soft and Hard RAID I can
say that total loss was only on systems using Soft RAID, with 1
exception - a tech had split an ARRAY across two controller ports, 6
drives on each port, a single large 12 drive RAID-5 setup. When he was
doing some work he was sure that RAID-5 meant that he could disconnect
the second cable and all would still be good :-(
With that said, on Soft RAID I've lost about 20% of them due to BIOS
Updates that appeared to screw with the OS, OS Updates that didn't work,
people that powered a server OFF without letting it shut-down, etc....
I use a Soft RAID "only" as a last resort, but I don't see them as
"unreliable" only that I don't trust them.
Hardware RAID, yep, you can have a loss, and normally this is due to how
the controller works. A good example of a crappy controller is the HP
XW6600 workstation, has a cheap RAID controller. If you have two drives
and want to mirror an installation already on Drive 0 (any drive) to
Drive 1, you can't - it must WIPE both drives to setup the array, so
it's a complete reinstall....
Many cheap cards have issues as well. I have found that Adaptec and
3Ware and even Promise make reliable cards, but only if you don't buy
the "Cheap" ones. I have a couple customers with 6x250GB IDE arrays that
actually use a Promise RAID card with 128MB RAM and they can hot-swap
IDE drives (yes, IDE). More than 4 years of run time without issue.
The real issue of soft vs hard is reliability of the OS, then
performance.
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