Software vs Hardware RAID

[Matthew Gillen]

Rusty Shackleford wrote:
> That is great,  I was not aware that there are 2 types of hardware raid.  I
> mainly use HP Proliant servers and they have an onboard raid controller and
> it allows me to do hotswaps.  Also Software raid, is that more
> suseptable to
> being corupted since it lives on the disks instead of a separate entity?

Well, technically software raid "lives" on the main CPU, not the disks.  So
the difference in reliability is the difference in reliability between your
CPU+main memory vs. a HW Raid controller.  Hopefully, they're both very
reliable, so there shouldn't be noticeable difference.

Software RAID might get a bad rap since it's more often used in conjunction
with cheap hardware (non-ECC memory for example), and typically if you spend
$1000 on a HW Raid controller, you're not going to put it in a $500 server.

Given comparable quality of the other hardware though, the only difference you
should see would be in performance and/or CPU load, not in relability.

Hopefully I'm not cursing myself here, but FWIW I've been using software RAID
with relatively cheap hardware for my home fileserver for many years, and
never had any corruption issues.

HTH,
Matt

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