[jdboyd]

> For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that if the machine had a crash or sudden power loss the hardware raid would live on long enough to finish its writes. SGI had tight control over the type of hardware you could use and it was usually good quality stuff.

Most of the SGI machine I've used of various sizes did not have hardware raid. In my experience, you were more likely to run into hardware raid on a PC than on traditional SGI or Sun servers (I don't have much experience with AIX or HP-UX), unless the unix server was in a SAN environment.

[Tor3]

Yep. The Octanes and the Challenge servers we used at work didn't have hardware raid, and, contrary to grandparent we did have regular issues on SGI with XFS (loss of data after power cycling, always), while we never had that on Linux, which surprised me. After all, it was so easily reproduced (on SGI): Write regularly to a file, power cycle, file empty afterwards. Did that on Linux, everything fine. Every time. Never ever had losses on Linux. NB: I did not test this immediately after XFS was ported to Linux, it's very likely that things were improved on shortly after, before we started testing XFS at work.

(As for hardware raid - I didn't start to see hardware raid regularly until HP started shipping rackmount servers with Compaq raid hardware, way back. Linux boxes..)

[lotharcable]

Sounds fair enough. I never used SGI personally. I was just repeating what I read while dealing with XFS issues back in the day.

Bad old days.