On 23:41 Sun 06 Feb , Devraj Mukherjee wrote: > What is the general opinion about software RAID? Does it actually work in > most cases or is hardware RAID the real deal.
It depends on how you are using it, and what kind of raid hardware. Cheap RAID hardware (and especially, RAID built-in to motherboards) uses the CPU for processing. It provides little, if any, advantage over software RAID. Good RAID hardware tends to be expensive. It brings additional, purpose-built processing power, so it is significantly faster when used for computationally intensive RAID, such as RAID5. RAID0 is not computationally intensive, so the extra processing power is generally wasted. I don't know how much improvement a good card brings to RAID1 or RAID10. Check it out before laying out a lot of money for a good card. 3Ware is a brand of hardware I have seen recommended for Linux, but I have not used it myself. I am running software RAID0 on an Intel D865 board with two 74G Raptor SATA drives. The speed (and quietness) is absolutely phenomenonal. I backup my drives to get the redundancy I need, I don't really need the 24/7, always on, uptime of a serious website. Hope that helps. Bill Roberts
