RAID software vs hardware RAID Post: 302438726

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers RAID software vs hardware RAID Post 302438726 by Corona688 on Tuesday 20th of July 2010 02:09:23 PM

07-20-2010

Registered User

Hardware RAID is handled by a specialized RAID controller card which does its own processing to make many devices act like one. This card is either configured through BIOS extensions(you may get an extra 'hit ESC to setup' message on boot) or through proprietary utilities. Once configured, the separate drives act like one device to the OS that you could do anything to you'd do with a normal drive, including boot from.

Software RAID on the other hand takes several devices already apparent to the OS and just accesses them through special routines, so they're treated as one device. The computer has to do all its own processing, so there may be some performance cost there. It may not be able to combine reads the way a hardware RAID could, i.e. you might not get double-speed reading from a mirrored array, but implementations vary. Because the drives still present themselves as many seperate drives to the kernel, it's harder to boot properly from a software RAID. I won't say impossible, but the kernel may need special configuration to properly autodetect and mount the array.

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LEARN ABOUT OPENSOLARIS

lsimega

lsimega(7D)                                                                                                                            lsimega(7D)

NAME

       lsimega - SCSI HBA driver for LSI MegaRAID 320-2x SCSI  RAID Controller

       The lsimega SCSI RAID  host bus adapter driver is a SCSA-compliant nexus driver that supports LSI MegaRAID 320-2x SCSI RAID devices.

       The  lsimega  driver supports  standard  functions provided by the SCSA interface, including RAID disk I/O  and  passthrough I/O to support
       SCSI tape and CDROM.

DRIVER CONFIGURATION

       The lsimega.conf file contains no user configurable parameters. Please configure your hardware through BIOS.

       The LSI MegaRAID 320-2x device can support up to 40 logic drivers. Note that BIOS numbers the logic drives as  1  through  40,  however  in
       Solaris these drives are numbered from 0 to 39.

       See attributes(5) for a description of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE         |      ATTRIBUTE VALUE        |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability                 |                             |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

FILES

       /kernel/drv/lsimega

           32-bit ELF kernel module.

       /kernel/drv/amd64/lsimega

           64-bit kernel module ( only).

       /kernel/drv/lsimega.conf

           Driver configuration file (contains no user-configurable options).

       prtconf(1M),   attributes(5),  amr(7D),  scsi_hba_attach(9F),  scsi_sync_pkt(9F),  scsi_transport(9F),  scsi_inquiry(9S),  scsi_device(9S),
       scsi_pkt(9S)

       Small Computer System Interface-2 (SCSI-2)

                                                                   20 April 2005                                                       lsimega(7D)