Hardware raid still ok?

What do you need RAID for? You have to balance several features in order to come up with the best storage solution for your needs. There's price, performance, data security, and data recovery. Software RAID means less expense (no hardware & most solutions, being Linux-based, are free) and no dependencies on a particular piece of gear when a drive fails. Hardware RAID is typically higher performance because they have customized controller chips (which are obviously going to be expensive) and they lock you into a proprietary technology that you have to replace with the exact same item in order to keep your data after a hardware failure or possibly even a hardware upgrade. Your ability to recover from a disaster involving your data may depend on how easy it is to find spares several years after you acquire your initial equipment. Upgrading to better/faster/bigger storage can also be more challenging and/or expensive.

No matter what sort of RAID you use, you still need enough connections for all the drives you have. Either you have to have lots of ports on the server motherboard itself or you need one or more controller cards. If you are using cards, chances are you probably want to use the performace benefits of the chip on the card. Mobo ports simplify matters a bit up front but they could be a bigger expense when it comes time to upgrade your storage subsystem. A controller card means you need to upgrade your storage components only when they become outdated/slow/insufficient capacity. This is almost certainly at a different rate than the other parts of your server go obsolete.

You have to also know not only what your current storage is capable of (performance wise) but what other solutions can provide. Is your array being held back by the access/transfer times of your drives, the throughput of your controller or some other limit (like your network if you're trying to deliver the data externally to the server)? Will a RAID card actually address that bottleneck? Are you sure your current config is fully optimized? There may be a way to configure the ports you have in such a way as to improve performance without having to replace anything (yet).

/r/homelab Thread