On 02/20 12:06 , Christopher Pearson wrote: > Yes, a decent HBA with Linux's built in RAID (md) is the way to go > unless you're dual booting with something other than Linux. About 10 years ago I used Linux software RAID quite a bit. Mostly I found that it was about an hour of hassle to replace a failed drive, make it bootable again, and be confident that if one drive died the system would still boot on the other drive. The same job would take a few minutes with a 3ware RAID controller. The value of the time wasn't worth the aggravation. Hardware RAID makes things so much more predictable. As a side note, being frustrated with md software RAID, I tried LVM's RAID as well. That ended up costing me a lot of (fortunately only personal) data when it silently failed to replicate and didn't give me any indication the mirroring had stopped. Things may have changed in the years since, but all my experiences with software RAID indicate to me it's for someone who doesn't mind fiddling with their computer for fun. That's not me anymore. -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com