Re: RAID

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 10:42:26PM -0800, lordSauron wrote:
> okay... so, let's just say that hypothetically I choose to be a little
> less than intelligent and try to use the motherboard built-in software
> RAID.  Would that work?

Not with the sarge installer for sure.  Maybe with the next installer at
some point.  There seems to be discussions of supporting dmraid in the
future.

> Also, I'm a little skeptical of Linux's software RAID being better
> (ie. faster) than my motherboards.  Is there any statistics I can look
> at in regard to this?

Well everyone that has tried both seem to agree the linux software raid
is much faster.  I guess having open source and many people look at it
and work on it has resulted in some rather efficient raid code, while
the makers of the fake raids on the motherboard just care that it works
with windows.  Given the performance of software raid in windows, it
doesn't take much to be faster than that, so it seems the fake raids
don't try very hard.

Having full software control over rebuilds is also a nice feature to
have.

Being able to see the state of the raid from software is nice.

Being able to recover the raid by moving it to an entirely different
system without worrying about the on disk format is very nice to have
(and is a problem with any hardware or fake raid setup).

> Once more, thanks for your considerable patience in dealing with me -
> someday I might evolve into a semi-respectable linux sub-guru...

Len Sorensen