On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Michael wrote: >Bear in mind that what you are calling "true hardware raid" is really >a microprocessor programmed to do the raid algorithims.
3ware has custom designed matrix switch chips to handle each IDE drive.
This *alone* is worth the cost of the card. The RAID parity calculations
are also done in hardware (not a bunch of CPU xor's.) You'd be surprised how
much data a small "slow" processor can move when properly programmed.
Are you talking about host-processor XOR or adapter card XOR? The i960 processor used in practically every RAID card known to man right now has an XOR engine in the memory controller. It's not quite as efficient as some higher-end implementations, but it's a heck of a lot better than having that i960 core spin through an XOR software loop.
Scott
- 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
