Re: software vs hw hard on linux

On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 07:34, Jeff wrote:

> What I'm wondering about is what folks experience with software raid vs
> hardware raid on linux is. A friend of mine ran a set of benchmarks at
> work and found sw raid was running obscenely faster than the mylex and
> (some other brand that isn't 3ware) raids..

I ended up going with a hybrid: RAID-1 across sets of two disks in
hardware on Adaptec ZCR cards, and RAID-0 across the RAID-1s with Linux
software RAID.

Although the ZCR (2010 I believe) supports 0+1, using software striping
turned in better performance for me.

This way, I get brain dead simple dead disk replacement handled by
hardware with some speed from software RAID.

Also, I would think mirroring on the SCSI controller should take traffic
off the PCI bus... <shrug>

I have another machine that's stuck using a Compaq 5i plus controller
with no battery backed write cache, in RAID 5. It sucks. Really bad. I'd
rather use an IDE drive. :)