[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Lefevre, Steven) writes: > I say go with RAID 5, on a controller card. > .. > > You get better performance than mirroring or regular drive, because > the data is spread out over your drives. It's not as good as disk > striping, though.
Ehh. Wrong. That is not how it works. If you have RAID5 with 4 disks, as we have here, one single write() will have the following effect. 1. The controller will have to read the whole stripe off the array. 3 reads from 3 diffrent discs. 2. Calculate the new checksum for the stripe. 3. Write the modified block back to the disk where it was changed 4. Updated the checksum This works Ok for multimedia and file storage, where you write()-call might be the size of a stripe or bigger. Then you can skip phase 1) on the list above. Ask any DBA; they will all tell you to never_ use RAID 5 for databases with dynamic content. Just don't. As for performance, seek times tend to be higher on a RAID5 array then on a mirror. The only thing which is good with RAID5 is read througput - which might be important for full table scans, but not much else. > So, all in all, RAID 5 gives fault tolerance and better performance. Why do you think people use RAID1? > You can have the OS do the RAID, but that puts a lot of burden on the > processor and OS. CPU is almost never an issue anymore - not for database servers, anyway. The increase in CPU-usage is seldom noticable. I've seen software raid (on Linux 2.4) outrun $2000+ RAID-cards. CPUs are many times faster than the puny i960 or Strongarm CPU which are put on RAID controllers. > I recommend getting a RAID card, and not a cheap one, either. Plan on > spending ~$500. If you get one. Get one with a battery and write-back cache. They will give you kick-ass performance for those pesky fsync's. -- Per Andreas Buer -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
