Re: Building a RAID system
On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 02:03:32PM +0000, Clive Menzies wrote:
> When I feel energetic I might go back and reinstall the two original
> servers running H/W Raid but they have been running fine over the last
> two years and the machines are pretty old (HP LHPros 8 years) and so it
> is more likely they'll be replaced.
If they have real hardware raid, might as well use it. It is simpler.
The ones to avoid are the integrated into generic motherboards "raid"
which is simply a driver/bios trick that implements raid in software.
It doesn't have an xor/comparison engine in hardware doing the real
work.
If your raid card is less than $100 (or maybe even $200) it is probably
proprietary software raid.
If you have a fast CPU and nothing to do with it on your server in
general, software raid is often faster than hardware raid (on linux at
least). I know I saw a performance drop in read/write speed when going
from software md1 to an IBM serveraid 4M using the same drives in a P3
733. Did free up the cpu to do other things though and the machine had
more need for cpu than disk I/O.
Len Sorensen
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