Dennis,
I am not THAT experienced with Raid on Linux, but from my experiences
with spec'ing out a Sun ES250, I would say that he should definitely go
with Hardware raid. As for the the question of Raid 0/Raid 5, you have to
ask yourself, can I be down while I rebuild? Raid 5 will give you slightly
better performance (depends on several things: raid controller cache, hdd
speed, network speed, and size of data files.), but if you loose a disk,
you will be down for a while. If you need a system that is never down, and
you want the performance advantages of Raid 5, then maybe look into a Raid
10 (stripped and mirrored). This is probably the best performance wise, but
is very expensive. I would check http://www.acnc.com/raid.html for a better
explanation.
Hope that helps.
Garl
Dennis Soper wrote:
> On 24 Apr 2000, at 17:42, Garl R. Grigsby wrote:
>
> > I have just setup a soft-raid box. I downloaded the Software
> > Raid-howto, carefully followed the directions, and everything went
> > very smoothly. This is not a real high performance box, P200
> > overdrive, 128 Ram, 4 1GB SCSI HDD, Raid 5, BUT it does work very
> > well. I am currently using the raid mount on a samba server.
> > Currently the only thing that is on there are some audio files (mp3s)
> > while I test this out, but so far, the performance is excellent. What
> > were your questions?
>
> He wanted to know about hardware vs. software RAID, performance
> of RAID 5 vs. RAID 0, cost, TCO (as in time to administer), and the
> difficulty of setting it up.
>
> The box is probably going to be a single-processor PIII-600 with 1/2-
> 1 GB RAM that has an average of 75 users attached during
> business hours, and there are databases involved, but any number
> crunching is done on the workstations.
>
> Cheers,
> Dennis
> "Custard pies are a sort of esperanto: a universal language."
> --Noel Godin
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Garl R. Grigsby
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