On Friday 23 January 2009 09:39:44 am 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. I think you want software raid. The little processor on a hardware raid card is unlikely to be better that what you already have for a cpu. If the hw raid card breaks for any reason you may be faced with trying to find just the same card and revision number to regain access to your data, a distressing experience no matter what. SW raid can confidently be expected to be stable over time. On point 1 I think you can look for blogs like the storage report and have a look at anandtech.com for reviews of raid including performance figures. On point 2 I think you will gain performance. The stipulated gain from 50 to 90 MB/sec seems quite achievable. On point 3 I think you need to look at testing others have performed to see what is the best (to you) combination of raid level, safety and speed. I might add that I have a currently working F7 implementation on a single Seagate 320 SATA drive and hdparm -tT shows 78 MB/sec reads while on another new drive, a Seagate 640 SATA I get 110 MB/sec. No raid at all and the only drive in the system. It might be worthwhile to examine your current setup further for bottlenecks before spending that kinda coin. Dave > > > > -- > This message has been scanned for viruses and > dangerous content by MailScanner, and is > believed to be clean. -- Canada must refuse to be entangled in any more wars fought to make the world safe for capitalism. -- The Regina Manifesto, 1933 -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
