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Mark, does your statement hold true for RAID5, or do the hardware controllers make a difference there?


Some of the hardware solutions may be faster doing writes to RAID5 than the Linux s/w RAID, especially when an older host CPU is involved.

But on modern CPUs, they've got tons of cycles to burn (rarely is a CPU anywhere near fully loaded), and the hardware interrupt handlers generally get priority, and Linux s/w RAID almost always beats hardware. Unless your hardware RAID card has megabytes of cache or something extra like that to boost it.

I'm doing work for a very very major server vendor, and Linux s/w RAID is what they're going with, for good reason.

Cheers


A lot of 'hardware' raid cards really aren't anyway. Most of the consumer cards are really software raid - the raid is done in the driver.

But even some of the real hardware RAID cards are often slower than linux software RAID. Even for RAID5 with its parity calculations. We just stopped using 3ware hardware RAID for terabyte-sized RAID5 arrays and switched to linux SW RAID after we found it to be nearly 3 times as fast. Our application has many files being continuously appended with frequent reads. (It's a log store device)
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