RE: [Xen-users] Software RAID

["James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> If you want to use those Fake-RAID stuff of modern SATA-Controllers, I
> personally prefer plain software raid. This is usually used as
Software RAID
> for Windows, because Windows doesn't handle software RAID itself, but
the
> Windows SATA driver does. Linux doesn't need any hardware capabilities
for
> software raid.
> 

Windows does do software mirroring, but IMHO it is not recommended.

The _only_ advantage that Fake-RAID might have over Linux software raid
is in the case where a drive fails in such a way that the BIOS starts to
boot off it but fails due to bad sectors on a disk before the Linux RAID
is loaded (eg the bootsector loads, but the blocks containing GRUB are
unreadable). If the disk fails completely then you are probably fine as
the BIOS will just boot from the next disk (which you have hopefully
installed the bootsector on too!), but if the unreadable parts of the
disk contain GRUB then you will most likely hang or enter a reboot loop.

Fake-RAID should be able to cope with this, at least up to the point
where the INT13 disk interface is still used...

James




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