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Hardware IDE/SCSI RAID for Windows 2000 Servers?
reezle asks: "Mostly I was wondering what other sysadmins have been doing for Mirroring or RAID-5 in their w.2000 servers. I really don't like the M$ 'Enhanced' disks that allow for RAID, since I've actually lost a volume during the conversion from 'basic' to 'enhanced', and also I worry that I will get locked out of the volume if the OS goes belly-up on me. There is also the idea that software RAID is much slower, but it's cheap, and so are some of my customers. What kinds of solutions are being used successfuly? What kind of recovery nightmares have people run into? Is IDE RAID ready for the real-world server market yet?"
What would it cost for your company to reconstruct the lost data?
Risk Analysis argument over!
Seriously, the Win2K volume management and "enhanced disk format" you worry about are a subset of the Veritas VM, licensed by MS. It's crippled without many of the data-recovery features, and doesn't include the file-system enhancements.
When you convert a Windows volume from "Basic", you are essentially performing the same operation as "Encapsulating" a native volume with Veritas on Solaris or HP/UX.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
First - 3ware makes an excelent line of IDE hardware raid cards if your too cheap for SCSII.
Secondly - Windows Software raid will blow up in your face - especially Microsoft's version. If 'lost' three RAID arays to Promise, and four to Microsoft before getting a clue and forever forsaking crappy software. Windows Software RAID sucks so hard, that even if they fix it now, it's suckyness will caryover for years.
So you really have two choices for Windows RAID - SCSI or 3Ware.
Aside: Too bad Microsoft and Promise are too stupid to review NetBSD's RAIDframe - this is software RAID done right. Totally abuseable - you can pull out an IDE cable and it just keeps chugging along. Easy to set up as well - no guessing if it's going to work, it just does.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
$300 will buy you a decent 3ware Escalade 7410 card, which comes with both Windows and Linux support.
Promise IDE RAID is a lot cheaper, but unreliable; I would get kernel trap exceptions all the time and it wasn't worth the trouble. Asides from a problem setting it up where the onboard motherboard ATA-100 driver was conflicting with the 3ware card, I haven't had so much as a hiccup. There's an erroneous report that says they only work on 64 bit PCI, but they work fine on 32 bit as well.
With CPU speeds being what they are, IO is really the bottleneck in your average computer. I've seen dramatic since the card went in -- I'd guess compilation time has halved.
If you're starting fresh, see if you can get a Tyan motherboard and 64 bit PCI and you should have no problems for the forseeable future.
There are Windows drivers, Linux drivers, and the FreeBSD kernel also has a driver (twe) for it too. You can also find the management software for FreeBSD, though not through 3ware.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
I use Promise FastTrack RAID controllers in a mirror configuration (two drives, one on each cable) in 15 Novell servers. I have both 66 and 100TX2 models in service (most of them for over a year) with no problems.
I also used one on my workstation (striped, two 7200RPM 20GB drives) for the better part of last year and it sped up my computer substantially with no problems.
When a server has gone down then usually both hard drives have good, valid data. When one hard drive goes down the other keeps trucking until I replace it (offline - I didn't get hot-swap enclosures, it happens so infrequently it's not worth it).
So for the low end (ie, CHEAP) hardware RAID from Promise is right on the money. If you want something without such bad anecdotal evidence (as attested by other posts in this story) then you will have to pay more.
As always, your customers get what they pay for. So far my company's investment has paid off over and over again - I don't have to recreate the entire server from the ground up (or from a backup) when at least one hard drive is good. I've had to replace 4 servers in the last year and one or both hard drives have always survived whatever caused the server to go down. (These are low usage, but physically punished servers)
-Adam