Re: hot-add unformatted drive to RAID array automagically
On Friday 04 February 2005 19:32, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
> > > So, what you want is hardware RAID. Not just because it does that, also
> > > because it's (usually) quite a bit faster.
> >
> > Is this proven or a myth? I've seen analysis that say software raid is
> > faster, sometimes much. I guess "it depends" (on CPU, if server is i/o
> > bound or cpu bound, etc.)
>
> Having a dedicated processor that does just one task usually implies
> faster processing than programming a general-purpose processor for the
> task.
Not if the dedicated processor has the performance of a 486 and the general
purpose processor is a P4 or Athlon.
> Note, I said "usually". I've seen a number of RAID arrays, and while
> some are extremely fast, others are even slower than a single regular
> hard disk when running in RAID5 mode.
>
> I've had good experiences with Mylex RAID-controllers in that regard.
In late 2000 I did some benchmarking of a Mylex Dac960 controller. It gave a
maximum performance for bulk linear reads/writes of about 10MB/s. Linux
software RAID gave 30MB/s on the same test with slower disks. However the
Mylex gave good performance for random seeks, extra caching I guess.
A RAID-5 setup without NVRAM for write-back cache will give poor write
performance. If you want to write one sector to a RAID-5 array then the
controller has to read the original sector and the checksum sector and then
write to the sector and the new checksum. This makes a single write become
two reads and two writes (one read and re-write on each of two disks). All
good hardware RAID systems have NVRAM write-back caches to allow
write-combining on RAID-5 lines. This gives a massive performance benefit.
For RAID-1 it's a lot easier to get good performance, Linux software RAID-1
didn't give optimum performance last time I tested. RAID-1 should give
double the read performance of a single disk for the case of two processes
reading large files linearly and for the case of a large number of processes
that are disk read bound. Linux software RAID didn't do so last time I
tested.
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