On Tuesday 03 August 2004 01:51 am, John Szakmeister wrote:
On Tuesday 03 August 2004 05:26, John Andersen wrote:
On Monday 02 August 2004 12:12 pm, John Szakmeister wrote: Software raid gets a bum rap because its often married up with cheap IDE and then compared against high end scsi solutions.
What's the CPU overhead like? To be honest, I haven't attempted to use the software raid driver since my P3-500... and it wasn't doing to hot then. I also keep the servers fairly taxed.
I have an ancient Dual PII 266 server in one of our shops and programmers sit there all day running compiles on several worstations (doing most of the work directly off the server). When it gets slow, the cpu utilization is still under the noise, that is, top is still at the top of the list. It never exceeds 10% cpu. (Dualies are really nice for this).
I'd be interested in hearing what you would envision as a decent software RAID solution. Right now with the 3Ware, I've got it set up as 4 disk RAID-5 with a hot spare.
That's a very nice (safe) setup. I've run 4 disks (3+h) in some machines and others I just mirror. In one machine I had a software raidt made up of 2 IDE drives and 2 ScSI drives, (because thats what the budget would allow - e.g. what ever you can scrounge). I'v been running Software raid since Suse 7.1. I have this SCSI Adaptec raid card I purchased to replace one of the software raids, but since it hasn't given me any problems in 6 years I've left it alone, and just use the Adaptec for benching. Once my processor speeds got up above 900mhz, the software raids beat that old Adaptec every time (using the same disks). -- _____________________________________ John Andersen