If I have a option between doing Hardware RAID versus having software raid via mdadm is there a clear winner in terms of performance? Or is the answer only resolvable by actual testing? I have a fairly fast machine (Nehalem 2.26 GHz 8 cores) and 48 gigs of RAM.
Should I be using the vendor's hardware RAID or mdadm? In case a generic answer is not possible, what might be a good way to test the two options? Any other implications that I should be thinking about? Finally, there;s always hybrid approaches. I could have several small RAID5's at the hardware level (RIAD5 seems ok since I have smaller disks ~300 GB so not really in the domain where the RAID6 arguments kick in, I think) Then using LVM I can integrate storage while asking LVM to stripe across these RAID5's. Thus I'd get striping at two levels: LVM (software) and RAID5 (hardware). -- Rahul _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
