Hosting again

[Jonathan Rockway]

* On Sunday 04 November 2007 02:34:44 pm Simon Wistow wrote:
> A friend of mine had hardware RAID set up in some form and then the
> controller went kapoof and despite the fact that the data was
> theoretically all still intact he claimed he was unable to retrieve it.
>
> Does this sound feasible? And, if so, was there a way to mitigate it?

I've heard of that happening with cheap consumer RAID.  The idea is that you 
can't find identical replacement hardware, and therefore your data becomes 
unreadable because the hardware stores data on the disks in some sort of 
unknown way.  That's why I would stick with software RAID on my desktop 
system... no reliance on some random Chinese vendor's RAID algorithm du jour; 
you can just use the open source code that comes with your OS.  Very easy to 
setup and recover, and the speed hit probably doesn't matter much.  Your 
workstation shouldn't need to hit the disk much, after all.

I'm sure hardware RAID is better when you have a big vendor providing you with 
some non-shit hardware though.  I don't really know though, since I'm in 
the "pay someone with a clue" camp when it comes to important servers.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway