On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 08:42:00AM +0100, Simon Matter wrote: > - Hardware IDE Raid: Most so called hardware RAID are simply software > RAID, because the driver from the vendor does software RAID. Those > driver are often binary only and they do RAID worse than the Linux MD > driver does it. Until you want to go with true hardware RAID like 3ware, > stay away from it.
Ja, I will. For one thing, it's not an option to rely on drivers supplied by the vendor, as you might suddenly get stuck without any driver at all as soon as a kernel update or something like that is neccessary. Well, 3ware seems to be what most ppl recommend. For another thing, I'm very reluctant with trusting any IDE hardware RAID. Before building on it, I definitely want to see that it actually works. > - I've been using LVM on top of software RAID0,1,5. I've been told that > the RAID function built in in LVM is not as good as Linux MD, YMMV. hm This sounds a bit overdone to me, but if it's better to use both tools, why not :) > - XFS on top of LVM/MD is very cool because you can grow volumes and > filesystems on the fully operating server. In fact, growing XFS can only > be done online. XFS is a nice FS, but once I tried it and managed to damage some data. It was probably my own fault, but I'm still a bit, hm, afraid of using it. Otoh, I'd prefer XFS over reiserfs --- I don't like reiserfs for no relevant reason, just a personal dislike. > Unfortunately there were some issues with snapshotting with XFS. Snapshotting? What's that? > - ext3 on top of LVM/MD works well too. Snapshotting works well. Growing > filesystems have to be done offline. There are tools to grow online, but > this is dangerous. Growing could be done offline, but I doubt that it'll ever be needed. The server may end up with about 15 million files on a 100 or 120 GB partition at the time it is running out of disk space. My intention was to use ext3 on that partition, but considering the large number of files, I begin to doubt that ext3 is a good choice. What do you guys think? GH
