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Re: Setting up RAID



Thus spake Stephen Gran (steve@lobefin.net):

> Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 13:09:22 -0400
> From: Stephen Gran <steve@lobefin.net>
> To: debian users <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
> Subject: Re: Setting up RAID
> X-Mailing-List: <debian-user@lists.debian.org> archive/latest/238748
> 
> This one time, at band camp, martin f krafft said:
> > I am looking to install a new rack server this coming weekend, and
> > since I don't really want to worry about backups to revive a dead
> > system (data backups are done over the network), I am looking into a
> > RAID 1 configuration.
> > 
> > I am currently in the process to decide between software and hardware
> > RAID. Linux has a full RAID system built in, and yet there are RAID
> > controllers one can buy. Why would I choose to pay money and get
> > a hardware controller?
> 
> It appears that hardware raid (from what google turned up just now - I'd
> investigate further before taking my advice (^8 ) is slightly slower,
> but more robust, and uses less clock cycles to run.  I guess an analogy
> would be winmodems using the OS to perform what can be (should be?) a
> hardware function.
> 


Think you have it backwards.  Hardware RAID is faster, especially since
it offloads calculations (parity, etc) from the CPU.  In RAID5 for
example hardware RAID generally blows away software in the event of
running in degraded mode.  This is of course except in the instance of a
very bad HW vendor with a bad implementation.

I've run both extensively for home and work, I'll take HW any day.

Robert




:wq!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert L. Harris                
                               
DISCLAIMER:
      These are MY OPINIONS ALONE.  I speak for no-one else.
FYI:
 perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'



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