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Comment by ahoka | Hacker News Reader

"The RAID controller logged the simultaneous loss of 3 disks from the array. All subsequent read and write operations against it failed."

People seem to forget that adding a RAID controller creates a single point of failure instead of removing one. :-)

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> People seem to forget that adding a RAID controller creates a single point of failure instead of removing one. :-)

At worst it does both. In most cases it really does just remove a single point of failure (a disk). Other non-RAID configurations likely use a shared controller too. Moving that single point of failure to a different controller doesn't make it any worse.

I suppose it depends on which is more reliable, HDDs or the controller. If the likelihood of a HHD failure is much higher than a controller failure, then it still makes sense to go with RAID.

Always use software RAID. I'd rather loose 30% on efficiency than creating a single point of failure with a random hardware. Software RAID on modern OSes (Linux, FreeBSD, ... ) are pretty darn reliable and fast.

And if your OS breaks you can always boot from another one and recover your cluster.

Now try that with an obscure Adaptec card which has been EOL for the last 4 years :-)

And the SATA/SAS controller of your Mainboard is invincible? Or the Mainboard itself? Or the CPU? What's your backup solution if they are faulty?

I use two different controllers in JBOD mode. Each controller manages half of HDDs. Then I build cross controller software RAID 1. That is, I choose two disks from separate controllers to build raid 1. Last but not least, all HDDs are mixed from different vendors across controllers.

For CPU, RAM there is no other option. you have to replicate stuff.

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