Re: Building a RAID system
On (01/02/05 09:16), Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> To: debian-amd64@lists.debian.org
> From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
> Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 09:16:50 -0500
> Subject: 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.
Hi Len
The LHPros seem to be a dedicated Raid servers and from memory had some fairly
fancy RAID configuration tools (I'd been given one and picked up the
other dirt cheap). At my then state of relative ignorance
it seemed sensible to use what was available; I'd only done a couple of
mac desktop installs up until then.
When, late last year we had to spec and set up a couple of low cost
servers with Raid, software raid using mdadm seemed and proved to be the
way to go. Apart from a couple of kernel related glitches, it was
pretty straightforward.
Thanks for the info
Regards
Clive
--
www.clivemenzies.co.uk ...
...strategies for business
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