To manage and monitor hardware raid, you need proper utility. Most of vendors provides raid utilities only for Redhat based linuxes. For Debian based distribution I have found very useful repository – http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages. You just need to know, which raid card you are using and follow provided instructions.
With shrinking IT budgets you will at some point be tempted fill your RAID controllers with cheap desktop hard drives. You may also be tempted to replace your servers system drives with them as well. I’m going to give you some reasons why you should consider buying those pricey enterprise class drives instead.
If your dealing with big RAID arrays with a linux 2.6 kernel you will need to tweak your block device readahead settings. This can double or triple your read speeds. The tweak is very easy. Continue reading