RAID--quick, cheap, good/fast, pick all 3

[gboyce at badbelly.com]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003 ron.peterson at yellowbank.com wrote:

> I've found Linux's software RAID to be very reliable.  I also recently
> used bonnie++ to compare the performance of software raid to a dedicated
> external raid controller.  10,000 RPM Ultra160 disks in both cases.
> Software RAID benchmarked almost twice as fast for many of the tests.
> My hunch is that two ~3GHz xeons basically just whooped the PowerPC chip
> running the dedicated controller.  Just a guess.  There's voodoo magic
> happening at that level that I just don't understand.

I'm not sure how reliable my information is, but I've been told in the 
past that software RAID generally blows away hardware RAID during normal 
operation, but rebuild operations during a drive failure are much faster 
with hardware RAID.

I've only setup hardware RAID in the past, an luckily I haven't had a 
drive fail in the RAID setup yet (Except for the drive I pulled during 
testing, but there wasn't any real load yet).

-- Greg