New OMV build: Hardware Raid or Software

Hi!

What's the goal, you're aiming on? Do you need high availabilty on your data? Do you think of preformance? Or is it only for backup?

If it's the last one - leave RAID alone. RAID is not a backup. If you want an internal backup, get a 2nd HHD, create a filesystem and a share. Set the settings to "read only" an do that any time you want via cron job.

rsync -abiv --backup-dir=/media/internal-hdd-name-for-destination/destination-folder/.recycle_`date +%F_%H-%M-%S`/ --delete /media/internal-hdd-name-for-source/source-folder/ /media/internal-hdd-name-for-destination/destination-folder/ --exclude .recycle

So you got a backup, what's not changable from your client. If something deleted on the source, it's not deleted on the destination, there it's only moved.

Than you could start another cron-job manually when nessesary. It delets the recycle-folder, when you're shure, you want to delete the data...

rm -r /media/ziel-platte/ziel-ordner/.recycle_20*

You won't have any fun with a card that cheap if you're talking about retail price.

Mine was about 200 € (for the 16port) or 100 € nowadays for the 8port controller, anything thats as cheap as your suggested price range only has a hardware like raid but still utilizes your cpu which renders the hardware controller irrelevant.

So either go for software raid as ryeco suggested or think about investing some money for a real hardware controller. But as many people using software raid with great success you will be just fine using with it, but don't expect, depending on the cpu, to max out the hard disks.

Greetings
David

Ummmm - sorry - but I would say, you don't need high avaiablity. When you got no RAID, that has to happen to get you in trouble: Your wifes notbook crashes and your NAS too. At this time, you maybe missing a tv-show.

Year, Hardware-RAID is cool, for real man. :roll:

Leave RAID alone, you're doing nothing critical (Okay, I don't now your wife! ) on the NAS. Get a good backup-strategy and just do backups (NAS-internal and external - that means: not at home!).

Let me just chime in here with my two euro-cents...

Starting with mdadm 3.2.6 it's able to read Intel Matrix Storage Manager Raid, so if you have an IMSM controller, you can use hardware raid. And if the controller gives out you can use mdadm on a liveCD or whereher to recover the data. I haven't tried this, but there are a lot of folks on the interpipse who have done this successfully.
So that's one point for hardware-raid and performance, and using software for recovery in case of a disaster.
0.02€

IIRC, this Intel-Thing is "Fake-RAID": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Matrix_RAID

What you say probably was true a few years ago, and in fact your link sais "The ICH10R supports Standard RAID levels RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, and RAID 5." I guess it depends on the hardware in each case. Obviously everyone should decide for themselves...

Like before, just my 0.02€

What ICH10R supports, is not showing, if it's a hardware-, software- or fake-RAID. But okay - keep your money!

There are positives and negatives to both.

If you use a software raid, the software could be installed on another available machine, if the first machine failed, the raid could then be recovered/restarted. Though a software raid will use system resources and will/may slow the system down.

If you use a good hardware raid, which does it's own processing, it will free system resources and should be faster than a software raid. Though if the raid card fails it may take longer to get the raid back online, unless a spare raid card is on hand.

Which one is better? Only your use requirements can determine that.

Unless you go with a high end raid card like LSI with 1 gig ram it's better off to go software raid. Don't use cheap raid cards if you value your data. Software raid is very mature and very stable and pretty fast as long as you have at least a quad core cpu. The high end raid cards are very fast don't need a fast cpu but with speed comes cost. They both have positives and negatives.