On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 12:33 -0700, Mike Hardy wrote: > I'm very interested in the relative SW raid / HW raid performance. I > have both in service (two raid 5 sets are actually the same size with > the same number of components) and see roughly the same as you mention. > One difference that I see is that HW raid should generate fewer > interrupts and lower bus traffic. In the early days of RAID, people always used to say that for speed, you had to get a hardware RAID controller instead of doing software RAID. However, I saw an interesting comment on a local linux user group mailing list recently. That comment was to the effect that hardware RAID controllers tend to have no where near the horsepower of a modern desktop CPU - so the claim was (I've not verified this!) that using software RAID would be much faster. I'm thinking that if you can do software RAID with a dedicated box that's doing nothing but RAID and a little network, then yes, that likely would be faster than some scaled-down hardware RAID controller - but it would also likely cost more, be less likely to have good hot swap, and so on.
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