On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 11:07 -0600, Michael L Torrie wrote: > Most consumer raid cards are really just software raid done in the > driver anyway. I've seen benchmarks that showed Linux' software RAID > works very well (RAID 0,1,5). I have been quite happy with software > RAID for my home machine. I know that Andrew McNabb is using about a > terabyte or more done with software RAID.
As Josh pointed out, the most important benefit of hardware raid is battery-backed cache. I doubt you'll get that on a $20 card anyway, so I don't see the point either. I use software RAID1 on a lot of machines and it works great. Saved our bacon in a number of cases. > As has been mentioned in the past, RAID 10 (or is it 0+1 -- I can't > remember) can give you many of the benefits of RAID 5 but is simpler in > some ways. Basically the desired configuration is a striping across 2 > or more RAID-1 (mirrored) sets. IMHO RAID10 surpasses RAID5 in all ways, except for the percentage of usable disk. RAID10 gives you exactly 50%, where RAID5 is higher. The tradeoff is just that the more redundant data, the less chance of a total meltdown. And the more disks in a RAID the higher the chance of 2 going out simultaneously, which for RAID5 means game over. Also remember that RAID != backups. RAID1 pairs do die. I've seen it happen, and without a recovery plan the results can be a nightmare. Corey
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