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?"

Comments

Re:No Hot Swap

[questionlp]

No ATA RAID hot-swap? Are you really sure about it since I did find information that states that ATA RAID is capable of hot-swapping... it just needs a decent ATA RAID controller (you can knock the low-end, aka cheap, Promise and Highpoint controllers off of the list) and a drive cage that supports hot swapping.

The following pages provide information about ATA RAID and hot swapping:

• Adaptec 2400A - FAQ

  It supports online capacity expansion, hot-spare and hot-swap (chassis required), and all major operating systems.

• 3Ware 7500-series controller - Datasheet
• 3Ware ATA Drive Cage - Product Specs
• Promise SuperTrack SX6000 - Datasheet

There are other products out there that do support ATA RAID and do provide hot swap facilities and capabilities.

DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ ON SLASHDOT

[electricmonk]

BEFORE you generalze this guy's statement to read that you can hot-swap any SCSI drive, please know this: Hot-swap is an electrical matter more than anything. Both ATA and SCSI support hot-swap, with the proper equipment. You will need to use 80-pin connector SCA SCSI drives (which combine power and data into one connector). These are intended to be mounted in hot swap chassis and plugged into a backplane, although adapters are also available to plug them into normal power and data cables.

There are also ATA drive chassis available that have some onboard electronics that allow the drive, mounted in the chassis, to be hotswapped into the appropriate recepticle, although I am not as familiar with these as I am with the SCSI drives (I have 3 of them in my desktop machine that I built and learned a great deal about SCSI in the process of getting everything working).

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD ANY DRIVE, ATA OR SCSI, BE "HOT SWAPPED" IF IT PLUGS DIRECTLY INTO THE BUS AND POWER SUPPLY. THIS WILL RESULT IN DAMAGE TO YOUR DRIVE AND QUITE POSSIBLY YOUR DRIVE CONTROLLER.