On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 03:18:43PM -0800, Ekechi Nwokah wrote: > Hi, > > Does anyone know of any software RAID solutions that come close to the > performance of a commodity RAID card such as LSI/3ware/Areca for > direct-attached drives?
Others have already presented pretty good descriptions of the pros and cons of SW-in-the-main-processor (AKA SW RAID) versus SW-in-a-smaller-addon-processor (AKA HW RAID). One thing that HW RAID has, though, that SW RAID fundamentally cannot get, is a battery backed write cache. This can, for many workloads, prove to give a very significant performance advantage (for sync heavy workloads you can get several orders of magnitude speedup). For other workloads it won't matter, of course. ... > With the availability multi-core chips and SSE instruction sets, it > would seem to me that this is doable. Would be nice to not have to pay > for those RAID cards if I don't have to. Just wondering if anything > already exists. CPU speed hasn't mattered for SW RAID the past decade. Really. Not for RAID-1, and not for RAID-5. -- / jakob _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
