RAID--quick, cheap, good/fast, pick all 3

[ron.peterson at yellowbank.com (ron.peterson at yellowbank.com)]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 11:53:17PM -0400, John Jannotti wrote:

> Any comforting experiences?  Will you try unplugging one drive while
> running your new setup and seeing how easy it is to deal with the
> consequences? :)

I always do this to make sure things are working.  I'd rather find out
something's screwy while I'm setting a machine up than, say, when the
machine is in full production and blows a disk during finals.  You also
want to make sure you can boot from more than one disk.

I've found Linux's software RAID to be very reliable.  I also recently
used bonnie++ to compare the performance of software raid to a dedicated
external raid controller.  10,000 RPM Ultra160 disks in both cases.
Software RAID benchmarked almost twice as fast for many of the tests.
My hunch is that two ~3GHz xeons basically just whooped the PowerPC chip
running the dedicated controller.  Just a guess.  There's voodoo magic
happening at that level that I just don't understand.

-- 
Ron Peterson                   -o)
87 Taylor Street               /\\
Granby, MA  01033             _\_v
https://www.yellowbank.com/   ---- 
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