On Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:55:14 PDT Kienja Kenobi <worthless.trash.junk at
gmail.com> wrote:
> I am not interested in backing up my data using any type of RAID.
RAID-Z is purely for backing up data with some performance increase
(Like RAID5).
Um, RAID is *never* about data backup. No raid configuration in the
world will let you go back and recover data some PHB deleted yesterday
and needs today - which a backup will let you do. Some RAID levels are
about robustness and reliability, in that they will let the system
continue running with disk failures. But that's a different thing.
> RAID0 is purely for performance. No data backup. ZFS will never be
able to achieve what RAID0 can do in the performance department (It
was never meant to be a replacement for RAID0).
I'm not sure ZFS "was never meant to be a replacement for RAID0" - I
won't pretend to speak for its developers. However, zfs does do disk
concatenation, and that presumably stripes (the technology has
certainly been available in Unix for a couple of decades). This mode
compares with HW RAID0 under testing (by which I mean it it wins under
some workloads and loses under others).
Once you get past that, you're down to the very old question of where
in the system to do the computation. Offloading always makes more
total cycles available, but may or may not result in faster wall time
processing of any given job. So which is better depends on details of
the implementation and what you're trying to do.
> Therefore, I will indeed be keeping my hardware RAID intact and I
will wait to try OpenSolaris when it supports my hardware RAID.
IOW, you're not merely leaving your data hostage to your hardware RAID
vendor, you're leaving your OS selection hostage to your hardware RAID
vendor as well.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org
