On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Hermann Himmelbauer wrote: > Hi, > I am considering putting up a slow but huge storage area. For cost reasons I > am considering 4* 300GB Maxtor 5400 drives with Linux Software RAID5. > > The CPU of this machine would be a P4-2.4Ghz. > > Some people told me that this configuration would be a bad idea as accessing > the RAID would produce a very high load and the RAID would be very slow. > > Is this true? Are there any performance/CPU Load stats with Linux SW-RAID that > I can have a look at? It'll be no slower than a single drive. Do make sure you use additional controllers though - you'll want to have 4 disks set to master (I'm presuming these are IDE disks) So you'll need to use the on-board controllers for 2 disks, and a separate dual channel PCI controller for the other 2 disks. I'm having bad experiences with the Promise controllers though, but from what I gather they are the best of a bad bunch. (Promise Technology, Inc. 20269) They _seem_ to work, but sometimes miss an interrupt or something and you get a process hanging in a "D" state for 10-30 seconds. On one occasion I've had the raid software detect this as a missing disk and knocked out that drive... Gordon - 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
