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In the market for rack-mounted hardware. by rorajoey2005-05-03 11:38:44
  Doesn't make sense to use SCSI by Myke2005-05-03 12:32:55
    Ummm...Isn't striping a form of RAID array? by classic_jon2005-05-03 14:33:22
      Striping is NOT RAID by Myke2005-05-03 14:58:56
        Understood about *nix and RAID but from by classic_jon2005-05-03 15:36:25
          Okay... by Myke2005-05-03 16:50:02
            ACSP by classic_jon2005-05-03 17:22:33
              Ah. by Myke 2005-05-03 23:53:48
Hardware RAID has a few design disadvantages that it'll never be able to get past:

-> incompatability (ie: Card X dies and is no longer on the market, you're downtime is potentially very large)
-> queueing (64MB write gets queued in the card's cache, the OS thinks its done and therefore issues a 1 byte read which takes aeons to complete because the card is FS agnostic and therefore can't reorder the queue.)
-> price
-> flexability (I can throw as many SATA or SCSI cards in a system as I have PCI slots, spread the load)
-> lack of pass-thru on some cards (For some stupid reason, my Mylex card can't handle arrays *AND* straight devices like CDROMs or tape drives. RAID or bust.)

You'll likely never see me pressing it into service if given the choice. I do have one machine running it (aforementioned Mylex) because I wanted to make sure all my reasons for disliking it are true. They are.

Running RAID0 on a DB server isn't the stupidest idea, if you're running high-granularity backups. But if you have a high-availability requirement... you'd darn well better be running a real RAID. 5 disks? so one-fifth or less reliable than a single drive.

Wow.

But if they knew the risks, that's their problem.

If I had been in your shoes, I wouldn't have done the work until I went to the decision maker and made sure they understood the risks and differences. And then make them waive my liability of failure, because if it DOES blow up, it's on my back to fix it no matter whose decision it was.

Anyway - I assume you (now) see my point that there's little reason to use SCSI now when you can do software RAID with cheaper hardware and better performance.
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