Hardware Mirroring Status

[Brett Worth]

I've never used hardware mirroring before and would like to hear some
opinions about it.

The systems in question has an LSI U320 SCSI controller and two 36G drives
that are to be mirrored.  I currently have a software mirror configuration
where all partitions except /boot are mirrored.  

I'm a little unsure how the disk failure recovery works with software
mirroring.  If the first drive fails I can hot swap it, resync the boot,
and reinstall grub providing I do it before the next shutdown.  

If its been shutdown I can do a CD boot to the second drive then rebuild
the first.  There's probably an easier way.

Since this is not going to always be under my control I was wondering if
using the LSI hardware mirroring might be easier for someone else to
maintain.  I've tested it and it works like it should but it seems to be a
bit invisible. i.e. I dont know how to test the mirror status from inside
the OS.  I assume the drive lights will say if there's a dead drive but the
resync status only seems available from the controller BIOS.

Is there someway to see deeper into the controller? sg3-utils?

-- 
Brett

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