Hardware RAID does not necessarily preclude speed. I put a Mylex extremeraid 1164 (32MB cache, 2 channels) in a dual 450MHz P3 connected to 4 18GB 10K RPM seagate wide low voltage differential SCSI disks in a raid 5 config and got about 22 MB/sec reads and writes as reported by bonnie.
The OS was straight RedHat 6.0 - no tweaking or tuning (except creating the ext2 fs with 4k blocks)
The raid array was set to a stripe size of 16k (which is not the default).
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 1999 10:31 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc:
Subject: Re: Dream RAID System
> From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Oct 5 22:48:26 1999
>
> Hi everyone--
>
> I have a question for everyone on the list: What hardware would you use
> for a RAID system? I want it to be as robust as possible. It does not need
> to be all that fast (equiv. or better than UDMA33 would be nice). I am
> concerned with failover mostly -- Hot swap and reconstruction.
>
> I am putting together a quote for a box that will serve as a DB/Web server,
> and data protection is the only important feature required. Are there any
> concerns with hot swapping between RAID personalities (RAID5 and RAID1
> mainly)....does one work better over the other when reconstruction comes
> around?
>
> SCSI or IDE, and which cards of each have best support for hot swap?
>
> Thanks in advance.
If you're not overly concerned about speed, but you NEED reliability, you
almost have no choice but to use a hardware RAID controller. The software
RAID stuff is nice, but I'd only bother with it if I needed either speed
or I was on such a tight budget that I couldn't afford a hardware RAID
card (I normally fall into the former category). The software RAID gets
extraordinarily confused with hot swap so that's not even an option unless
you're prepared to spend quite a lot of time becoming a "wizard".
In terms of speed, RAID 0 is king. In terms of reliability and fault
tolerance while still being speedy, RAID 5 would seem to be the choice.
That said, I use the software RAID drivers daily. The level of confidence
I'd have in the "survivability" of data is directly proportional to the
amount of time you're willing to spend dickering around with the RAID
system.
Best of luck,
Chris
--
Christopher Mauritz
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
