Hardware RAID vs Vinum?

[Don Bowman]

From: Marc G. Fournier [mailto:scrappy at hub.org]
> Why one over the other?
> 
> The main advantage I see to Vinum is that it makes doing stuff like
> firmware upgrades on a hard drive alot easier, since you see all the
> drives ... but, does paying a couple of hundred extra for a RAID
> controller give me any major advantages over that?

Devices like aac have a cam passthrough (aacp) which allows
firmware upgrades and smartmontools etc to work.

the advantage to the hardware raid is that you can make the
root partition be on the raid, so the machine will still boot 
if a drive fails, where with vinum, you cannot do that. You also
have less worries about vinum changing between FreeBSD versions :)
Newer raid controllers have hardware xor support which makes their
performance pretty good even with slower processors.

--don