[svlug] Lots o' disk space

[Chris Miller]

Aaron Porter wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Chris Miller
> <lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ubuntu, no.  Ubuntu isn't that hot on RAID.  It took me and a launchpad
>> bug report to get NVIDIA NFORCE NVRAID to work on 8.10,
> 
> Oh, excelent. Write off a distribution based on a single data point.
> They were probably doing you a favor though, most consumer grade RAID
> cards are a REALLY bad idea. No, worse than that. If you really want
> to go down that road, make sure you buy two or three cards (or
> motherboards) and make sure to keep them flashed to the exact same
> firmware revision. Most of these cards will make your disks an opaque
> binary blob and make recovery from a controller failure a true
> exercise in agony. This can also be said of more "enterprise" cards
> like 3ware and LSI at least their product lifecycles are measured in
> years not weeks.

You need to take a stroll through the launchpad bug tracker.  There are 
a ton of dmraid bugs of all kinds, for nvraid, sia raid, and zounds of 
other raid devices I never knew existed.

My own experience trying to disable nvraid and use software raid instead 
ended quite painfully with no working raid.

I write off Ubuntu because I personally tried it.

>> and I'm not sure how software raid would work with Ubuntu.  I'm sure it could be
>> made to work, but the whole reason of using Ubuntu is that it just sorta works
>> without being told...
> 
> It works great. The only drawbacks I'm aware of are that RAID-10 is
> still a "do it by hand" operation and when scripting the installer you
> can still only create a single RAID volume (which can be partitioned
> as you wish). If you need more than one volume, it's a by-hand
> operation in your late_script or post-install.

Hmm, I'll have to bring a few old drives and an old machine to an 
installfest some time to watch you work your magic.  Apparently you can 
glean better information out of the same documentation than I can.  ;-)