Saturday, May 20, 2017

Should I use SW RAID / setting up RAID on HP Proliant server with Ubuntu



I have looked at a number of messages regarding software vs. hardware RAID here on SF but can't figure out which one I should use. The server I'm installing is HP Proliant ML330 G6 and the RAID controller on that is HP Smart Array B110i SATA RAID Controller (RAID 0/1/0+1). Is this a real HW RAID or should I just skip it and use the SW RAID?



The box has three disks, one 250GB and two 1.5TB disks. The smaller one I thought will have the /boot, / and /swap partitions and the two bigger ones will be on RAID1. How do I actually set this up? I tried using the tools that came with the server (StartSmart, as well as the ROM configuration utility) and configured the two disks as a RAID array, but the Ubuntun installer still sees them as two separate disks.



Should I just first install Ubuntu on the small disk and then configure the RAID array or should I somehow be able to configure the RAID array so that the two disks are shown as one to the installer?



Answer



Unless you enabled the battery backed cache and have a cache at all (not all HP SmartArrays come with that anymore, which boggles the mind) then I don't see much difference between the two. Software RAID is ever so slightly more fragile in extremity, but for nearly all running should perform just as fast. If not faster.


No comments:

Post a Comment

linux - How to SSH to ec2 instance in VPC private subnet via NAT server

I have created a VPC in aws with a public subnet and a private subnet. The private subnet does not have direct access to external network. S...