Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote: > We got that to work. I don't know if this is a "pseudo software RAID > controller" and I don't need to "cheap out" because it isn't my money! > So should I be buying a hardware RAID controller? How much will that > cost me? What is the benefit of the hardware RAID over softRAID? softRAID is a viable solution, so don't discount it until you've seen how your system performs with it. If you have a sufficiently quick machine with good I/O and plenty of RAM, your overhead for softRAID might not even be noticed. What I suggest is to watch the performance of your server resources for a while. If you find that your CPU gets pegged while pushing data to disk (writes), you might want to upgrade to hardware raid. (Cacti and Munin make some nice graphs for these things.) My favorite SATA RAID controllers are the 3Ware Escalades. I would stay away from Promise controllers if at all possible. I don't know how the Adaptec controllers perform, but in all cases you're going to pay an exceptional chunk of change to get hardware RAID. You'll easily spend between $350-800 depending upon the number of drives you wish to support. If this is a high-availability server, you may want to invest in the "battery" module for the card as well, which keeps your write transactions alive in the event of a power failure. (You might not need this if your UPS gives sufficient warning to the system to tell it to shut down cleanly.) That's between $50-200 depending upon the vendor of the RAID card. Good luck! Chad