Hello, I'm about to set up an IDE RAID5 with 4 7200rpm 160GB hard drives under Linux 2.6.0-test. I found a 3ware Escalade 7410 card and thought this would be perfect for the job, but read recently about the poor write performance. It was suggested in the archives that Linux software raid could do better. While reliability and read performance are my main concerns, in that order, I wouldn't mind having decent write performance too. Since I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing Linux software raid with 3ware hardware raid, I think it would be interesting to do some myself, especially because a 3ware controller running in JBOD mode should be significantly better than most other IDE controllers. I plan to use tiobench and bonnie as suggested in the FAQ, but I'd welcome suggestions for other benchmarks to run. I have some questions about setting up this test and practical use of software raid: * Can software raid 5 reliably deal with drive failures? If not, I don't think I'll even run the test. I've heard about some bad experiences with software raid, but I don't want to dismiss the option because of hearsay. * Is it possible to boot off a software array with LILO or GRUB? * This is probably a major point of contention, but what filesystem(s) fit well with my priorities of reliability, then read speed, then write speed? I only need metadata journalling. XFS and ext3 are the two fs' that come to mind, but I'm not sure how they compare, and again, I haven't seen great benchmarks. * Is it a good idea to tell ext3 about the stride of the array even on a hardware RAID setup? If I go the XFS route, is there any equivalent? * Any particular /proc settings that could be tweaked? I've seen suggestions relating to bdflush, but don't know if they still apply to 2.6. I'd also like to note that even if I don't end up using software raid, it seems like a great subsystem and I'm thankful for its development. Thanks, Aaron Lehmann - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
