On Monday 02 August 2004 06:59, Per Jessen wrote:
John Szakmeister wrote:
I don't know much about the operation of the software RAID driver, but I've read time and time again when researching solutions the Linux's software RAID driver beat the pants off of most manufacturer's software RAID drivers.
It depends on your needs. If you have a system with lots of concurrent activity, software RAID on IDE *will* be a bottleneck. There *are* good reasons Adaptec why can sell their very pricey SCSI RAID controllers, and those are all about performance. If you're talking SCSI, I'm not sure how poor/well software RAID will perform in comparison to hardware RAID, but I suspect a hardware controller will still win if you're talking lots of concurrent activity.
Actually, I was referring to the fact that some of these cheaper IDE RAID cards are actually IDE controllers with a software RAID driver. In those cases, the Linux folks have substituted the 'md' driver in place of the software driver provided by the manufacturer, and have achieved much better performance. I completely agree that if what you need is throughput, then a true hardware RAID is the way to go. That's why I use the Escalade. :-) -John