Feizhou spake the following on 7/18/2007 11:58 PM: > Alvin Chang wrote: >> On 18/07/07, Tony Mountifield >> <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> In article <f7iufv$1cc$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, >>> Tony Mountifield >>> <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> > >>> > My question is: which kind of configuration will generally give me >>> better >>> > performance? To use the IHC7 RAID-1 as currently set up, or to use >>> Linux >>> > software RAID-1 as I am used to doing? Any other reasons to choose one >>> > over the other? >>> >>> Thanks for the responses, confirming what I thought: disable SATA >>> RAID and >>> use Linux software RAID for mirroring. So that's what I've done. >>> >>> It appears that my Centos 4.4 install didn't know about dmraid >>> devices anyway. >> I personally would give fakeraid a because the hardware chipset >> wouldn't take as much CPU time as soft-raid. Why are you using 4.4 >> instead of 4.5 as you mentioned in your previous post? >> > > There is a reason it is called FAKEraid. They provide zero cpu > offloading, they do not come with a chip that does raid processing let > alone a battery backed up write cache. The chipset only handles SATA or > ATA channels. > > Oh, if you want to try the hardware raid is faster than software raid > line, then I have got news for you. Some time back, there was this i960 > chip from Intel that was very popular on hardware raid solutions. It > sucked. It sucked big time. Yes, it did offload a fair bit of cpu > processing from the AMD/Intel cpus then but the i960 was so slow, using > software raid was just a no brainer since you get twice the speed for a > 10% cpu load. > > Today, hardware raid come with big memory caches and that is the only > reason they are faster than software raid in certain cases like raid5. > Any hardware raid card that does not come with a memory cache is not > likely to be much faster than a software raid solution especially when > using the more complicated raid arrays like raid5/6. You will notice > that products from 3ware and Areca all now come with memory caches. > There is no such thing as a cheap hardware raid card. The i960 doesn't count, since it hasn't been used for a while. I think it was designed as a printer rendering engine processor, and was never designed for the load that raid imposed. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!! _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos