Originally posted by: Caveman
If Ghost and Fileback are just "snapshots"...
Then, what are some software RAID solutions?
Any RAID controller that costs less than, oh, $250 or so is software-based. As are all onboard RAID controllers that I have ever seen. And then there's doing RAID purely in software, by having the OS split up the writes between the drives.
And... if they are inferior, why would anyone use them? Is it because:
a) Their hard drives are "too different" to be RAIDed? How similar do the drives have to be??
Well, they have to work on the same controller, obviously, and for most RAID levels they have to be the same size (or else the larger one is cut off and only some of the capacity is used).
Software RAID can do things like using both IDE and SATA/SCSI drives in one RAID setup (although you wouldn't usually want to do this, for performance reasons).
b) They don't want to get in their computer and start flopping jumpers around (they just want to do the "easy" software method)
It's not really any easier or harder, but it's usually cheaper. Like I said, you'll pay at least $200-250 for a hardware RAID controller, and the
good ones with lots of onboard RAM (especially if they are SCSI controllers) can cost much more.
If you have CPU power to burn, a good software RAID implementation should work just as well as 'hardware' RAID. And for RAID0/1/01/10, the CPU overhead is pretty low.