Re: [tlug] White Box: Some Assembly Required ...

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2018-06-22 23:39 +0900 (Fri), CL wrote:

> - Six Toshiba 3Tb HDDs, which I want to use to make a hardware RAID 5 
> long-term storage disk.

Don't do it. I've worked with a lot of hardware RAID systems (more in
the '90s than now) and the cheap systems, by which I mean
sub-$100,000, have invariably been less reliable and had more problems
than good software RAID such as is currently available in the Linux
kernel.

This isn't so suprising, really, considering:

1. Linux kernel RAID has probably seen hundreds to thousands of times
   as much testing as any on-motherboard hardware RAID system.

2. The lack of flexability (e.g., not being able to pull your disks
   and drop them into another system) can really hurt your chances of
   recovery when things start to go sideways.

On 2018-06-22 12:33 -0300 (Fri), Schwartz, Fernando G. wrote:

> I'm already hearing somebody will come up here saying you don't need 
> hardware RAID and I can tell you, that's just a lie if you're in for the 
> best your hardware can do (traditional Linux world excuses).

So what do you mean by "best"? Certainly on modern CPUs performance is
no longer an issue; RAID will use a trivial amount of your CPU so
there's no point in off-loading it.

Inverse's point is also good. If your data are important to you, you
should have an off-continent backup. Amazon AWS and Google Cloud both
have solutions designed for this.

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch