SATA Raid

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 08:06:05PM -0400, Robin Humble wrote:
> are they faster than software raid5?

I don't know.  I guess it partially depends how much cpu power you have
to spare for running the raid.  Of course when running raid in software,
you end up transfering the parity data over the bus too, but if you are
on a slower bus (not an option with areca cards of course) then you
could end up with less throughput just as a result of that.  With PCI-X
and PCIe x8 that shouldn't be an issue of course.

> we're thinking of giving up on hardware raid (3ware 12-way SATA mostly)
> and just using software as (from our testing) it's both faster and cheaper.

Well I was told a few years ago at a linux show by a 3ware distributer,
that most of their customers used the 3ware cards with linux as simply a
sata controller with a lot of ports, and ran software raid on them.

Certainly the software raid always has the advantage of being hardware
neutral.

Len Sorensen
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