[GLLUG] Re: Booting / as a RAID device in Ubuntu

Michael George george at idealso.com
Fri Dec 7 14:16:13 EST 2007


On Fri, December 7, 2007 2:04 pm, Dennis Kelly wrote:
> Well, my option would have been the typical crappy onboard raid... I
> don't hold the user-workstation-level on-board raid chipsets in the
> highest of regard... also, when it comes to solving problems like mine
> below, I have tons of options because I have source code, communities,
> and other resources.  I'm also using RAID 1 for everything (2 x 250 GB
> disks for OS, 2 x 750 GB for data) so my setup is very clean and
> simple this way.
>
> Unless it's some heavy duty, expensive, server-class RAID controller,
> I don't see much advantage to hardware raid, including performance and
> RAID5 even.  This is just my opinion though.  Also, over the years,
> I've seen even entry level server RAID controllers have firmware
> issues that result in serious data integrity and stability problems.
> So I usually don't even look at hardware RAID unless I'm talking
> Terabytes and enterprise numbers of users, i/o, and/or uptime.

I was curious because I've tended away from software RAID and gravitated
towards 3Ware hardware RAID.  One reason is to avoid the issue you
encountered: non-booting because of software configuration or boot-time
modules in the kernel.

We do agree on one thing, though: we don't hold the user-workstation-level
on-board raid chipsets in the highest regard  :)

> On Dec 7, 2007 11:51 AM, Michael George <george at idealso.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, December 7, 2007 1:30 pm, Dennis Kelly wrote:
>> > Ended up fixing it myself with a lot more debugging.  Found I had to
>> > update mdadm.conf manually.  The update-initramfs process scans
>> > mdadm.conf for arrays and automagically adds the devices to the init
>> > filesystem.  All my volumes are raid1 now, booyah!
>>
>> Why did you choose software RAID over hardware RAID?  Cost?
>> Configurability?

-Michael George


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