aragonx@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hello all,
I had a drive failure a few months back so I decided it was time to rework
my home server's storage.
Now I have 5 750GB SATA dives and now I need some advice on how to set
things up.
My original idea was to put them in a RAID 5 configuration. This sounded
good until I started researching RAID controller cards. It looks like it
will cost me $520 to get a good PCI-E card (3Ware 8 port). I don't think
I want to spend that much if I don't have to.
My goals are two fold.
1) I want to get some redundancy in case of a drive failure.
2) I want to increase my performance. I have benchmarked my read and
write performance to and from this server. Using Samba, I seem to be able
to get about 50Mb/sec reads and 40Mb/sec writes. I am on a gig network
and would like to be able to max out the cards (90Mb/sec is what I get at
work).
So, the question is, what should I do?
1) Bite the bullet and get the hardware RAID controller. Will this give
me the performance I want?
2) Go with a software RAID 5. Will I lose performance with this
configuration? If I use this but only get modest performance gains, that
would be acceptable.
3) Go with some other software RAID level.
Any help would be appreciated.
---
Will Y.
If you understand that there is really no such thing as hardware based RAID.
There is 'dedicated hardware' based RAID, which is software based RAID
on a card that does nothing else but RAID.
Most of these RAID cards have a small, slow, CPU, and relatively slow
RAM modules to run the RAID software.
So considering that, what do you gain from dedicated hardware for RAID?
You get a commercially supported RAID software and hardware package, and
you get to unload a bit of CPU from the main system.
Considering that the CPU on the card at max performance is probably 1/3
of a core from a modern CPU, then that is not really much of a savings.
The real consideration for RAID 5 is survival. In either situation you
have to have a spare drive, and you have to consider availability of new
drives to match them in the future.
Good Luck!
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