[ale] Hot Point RAID and Linux

[Stuffed Crust]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 06:23:11AM -0700, Mike Panetta wrote:
> In my experience Linux software raid is faster then the hardware
> controller cards.  Its not necessarily as robust though.  The company I
> used to work for benchmarked several different hardware cards (the 3ware
> escalade with 7200RPM ata 100 drives on it, a mylex dac1100, and a
> couple of AMI Megaraid cards) none of them could outperform the Linux
> software raid solution.  We used the same exact drives to compare, so
> its not like we were using 7200RPM drives with the Mylex ctrlr, and
> 15000RPM drives with linux RAID. ;)

Now did you test them with RAID5 or just RAID0/RAID1?

Having a hardware XOR engine (ie the host CPU doesn't do the work) in a
RAID5 setup makes a rather substantial difference in overall system
throughput.

Remember, it doesn't matter if the host CPU can crunch the numbers faster
if it's supposed to be running server code.

Factor in the bus I/O overhead of having to perform the piles of
read/writes necessary to update the RAID5 parity stuff, and hardware is
the only way to go.

 - Pizza
-- 
Solomon Peachy                                   pizza at f*cktheusers.org
I'm not broke, but I'm badly bent.                         ICQ #1318344
Patience comes to those who wait.                         Melbourne, FL
               Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur

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