Andy Fletcher wrote:
But in my experience you would never really be buying such a cheap server with the intention of putting h/w RAID in it, since there's a reason you only wanted a £150 box in the first place :
For me, I just don't see the benefit of a dual-quad-core-processor machine with gigabytes of RAM to server a few files over a gigabit LAN. A Celeron could do it; throwing money at it won't really gain me anything! So even if I did want full hardware RAID (eg if the server was going to be hammered constantly) I'd consider offloading the processing to a decent RAID card on principle (albeit that the CPU still wouldn't be taxed and could probably happily handle the processing faster than the network card could dish out the data even then). Disk read/write speeds probably matter far more than the RAID card (he says without any research to back him up).
I think sometimes we forget just how fast an entry level CPU is these days. Unless the CPU is busy with other things (eg a busy database server) I don't really see what can be gained by offloading its work to another processor on another card.
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