RE: Re: [OT] VERY STUPID RAID QUESTION!

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>What I'm trying to say is weigh up your needs ... If the risks of the
>storage system you're looking at are too great then use something else
>but there are risks associated with anything.

Yes, I know that. I helped build a datacentre for Deutsche Bank, and we
spent a ridiculous amount of money on fault tolerant equipment - each
time you do, all you do is push things back to the next most likely
failure mode, and chalk an extra zero on the end of the bill.

To get 99.9% uptime costs ten times as much as getting 99%, to get
99.99% costs as much again. "three nines" reliability, 99.999% is
what
Compaq were pushing with the high end Proliants, redundant PSUs, disks,
controllers, nics, running in clusters with active failover etc etc.

However, I'm keen to make sure this isn't seen as a debate about value
for money - it's not. I am not attacking Highpoint controllers because
they are cheap, or because higher priced raid controllers are more
expensive.

I am attacking highpoint controllers because they have a horrific track
record of causing data loss, and worse silent corruption of a file
system. I'm not knocking IDE, or IDE RAID, or even Hardware RAID. I'm
warning anyone who will listen not to use controllers manufactured by
this company, because in my professional capacity I have witnessed them
going ass-up on a regular basis.

And if you think this is just me - do a google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=HPT%20corruption

Hundreds of complaints both from highpoint cards, and from highpoint
chipsets integrated into motherboards, running hard raid, soft raid, no
raid at all, single disks, multiple disks, and always, worryingly, the
corruption happens without an OS complaint. It's not until a critical
file gets hosed that people start to notice.

Of course, do a search for promise + "data corruption" and you
will get
a large number of hits too - but in this case, the vast majority have
lots of entries in the system log indicating that the disks are having
problems. It's less of a problem if you know it's happening.

Another related feature of the Highpoint controllers when running in
RAID mode is to conceal the SMART info from the disks - running a tool
like AIDA, you get pre-failure diagnostics that can warn you if a disk
is looking a bit dodgy - run in a HPT array, none of that info is passed
on by the drivers, so you can have a disk squawking it's head off that
it's about to die, and you won't know until it does... (and takes your
entire array with it, of course ;) )

>For my domestic use there was no other solution to getting 8 ATA133
>drives hardware RAIDed

Why use hardware raid at all?

A perfectly adequate solution is to simply install regular IDE
controllers from any vendor you like (although, I'd check that it isn't
using an HPT chip!) hook up your disks as regular IDE, and let windows
handle the volume configuration.

When I had my Linux based mini-disaster, a lot of the guys said that
it's better to use software RAID under Linux too.

>I hope I don't see my DVD server array go tits up but if it does it
does
>so after I had to weigh up the pros and cons ... IDE RAID isn't evil.

Absolutely - IDE Raid isn't evil. But Highpoint is.

>Just evaluate realistically what you *NEED* and what you are prepared
to
>spend achieving it.

Well, imo (and after all that's all it is, my opinion) the best solution
at this price point is simply to use regular IDE controllers (and I
don't have any great thing for Promise - SIIG, Via and Intel all do
chipsets that can be found in cheap IDE Controllers) and allow the
Operating System whether that's windows or linux to handle the disk
volume configuration.

It's my opinion that this is also more recoverable - in most cases, the
disks can be attached to *any* controller in the event of a hardware
issue, and windows will sort it out - if using hardware RAID, you need
to get another identical (and I mean IDENTICAL - down to the firmware
version) raid controller.

I.



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