Combining two raid cards

[Zodd]

Does anyone know if its possible to combine two 4 ports raid cards into a 8 disk raid? and if its possible to boot from it?

 

[aE0n]

What kind of RAID are you looking for? It's possible to make two arrays then combine them with an OS based RAID.

 

[bkch0]

The only way is software raid.

and you would not be able to boot from it unless you have another drive to boot or have a boot partition that only resides on 1 raid card.

 

[yinan]

Higher end raid cards allow this.

 

[Nothinman]

If you want to do it in hardware you'll need to pay out the ass. If you want to do it in software it should be no problem. This is yet another reason why software RAID is infinitely more flexible and awesome than hardware RAID.

 

[yinan]

Software raid except for ZFS sucks. Uses CPU cycles for processing writes/parity. Software raid is slow and a PITA to deal with.

 

[Nothinman]

Software raid except for ZFS sucks. Uses CPU cycles for processing writes/parity. Software raid is slow and a PITA to deal with.

Linux software RAID performs on par, if not better, than most hardware implementations. Using the host CPU for XOR calculations isn't a problem these days. CPUs are fast enough that unless you've got an extremely CPU bound application on the same server it won't be an issue. Even with SSDs I doubt you'll find a drive or set of drives that can read/write data faster than a CPU can process it.

ZFS is all the rage these days, but I wouldn't subject myself to Solaris just to get it. The features just aren't worth the pain. I'd much rather use a decent system like Linux and live without the extras ZFS brings.