--On April 10, 2007 5:48:26 PM +0200 Michelle Konzack <linux4michelle@freenet.de> wrote:
I can not believe that a HSS with PATA Hardware can support an external ext3 Journal for a very fast Raid-5 of 3600 GByte.
RAID-5 is extremely slow at writes. Also can't forget about seeks. Depending on your access patterns an external journal can be a definite win, sometimes it's always a win with certain access patterns. EXT3 also by default only journals metadata, not data, which means the write rate to the journal is relatively low.
i.e. spend $50 on a new SATA drive for the external journal device and get 80-90% of the performance improvement that you would get for spending $500 on a 4GB I-RAM.Better to use a Western Digital WD360 Raptor which is SATA but Hardware is SCSI and costs around 96 Euro (~130US$).
Depends on your application. :)