| I think you meant 'if you're NOT really concerned about performance.'
| The benchmarks I've seen for array controllers come nowhere near the
| performance of a software-based array on a simple SMP server. For one
| thing, the processor on, say, a DPT or ICP RAID controller is nowhere
| near as powerful as an Intel Celeron, much less a DEC Alpha. Comments?
w/ software RAID on a PII 233, the load on the system was hovering 2-6 (heavy writes
to a RAID 5 array). w/ the hardware array, the load is <1 all the time, and the
system performs (as expected) much much faster now.
for that box, it's no contest for me. ymmv.
btw: as long as the cpu on the raid controller is fast enough to keep up with the
data you're sending, who cares if it's slower than an alpha? also, some controllers
(the ones I've used anyway) have NVRAM on-board to speed up writes -- something the
software raid doesn't do.
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"When you're done developing software, all you have are empty pizza
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