On Mon, May 01, 2000 at 03:23:42PM -0600, Anders Engle wrote:
> We just got a PowerEdge 4300 from Dell. It came with the PERC2/SC raid
> card, and that has to be THE slowest raid card ever. I've tried updating
> to newest drivers and so forth and it was still pretty bad. So I tried a
> software raid solution using the on board controller. Now, that kicked the
> PERC cards butt. However I'm still thinking that a hardware solution would
> be preferable in this case.
> I've read what I could about hw raid cards that support linux, but some
> real life experience would be invaluable. So does anyone dare to recomend
> a card? Price is less of a consern over performance.
In my experience hardware raid is always significantly slower than software
raid.
Imagine a quad xeon sitting idle because the raid can only handle about
7MB/s with 4 disks in raid 5.
Now imagine that software raid in a single processor alone (PII-450) achieves
at least a throughput of 20MB/s read/write with ENOUGH cpu to spare!
(Ehh, just loaded the wrong scsi-driver I imagine, that had a bottle neck
at 20MB or so?)
Beside the difference in speed: some brands of raid-controllers (I mean those
cards for scsi) are really in alpha or something, looking at the headaches
they are causing. Locking up, bad (eh actually none) scripting interface, and
most of all: when you need them (bad disk) the fail to boot because of a bad
disk... Still these are sold as the best raid-controllers ever...
No, my choice is almost definite: software-raid can easily beat hardware
raid, and there is the source code... (Which could have been really helpfull
in case of the hardware raid)...
--
intel1: 7:59am up 9:22, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
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