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

Stay away from Windows software-raid.

[zulux]

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.