Jeff,
> What I'm wondering about is what folks experience with software raid vs
> hardware raid on linux is. A friend of mine ran a set of benchmarks at
> work and found sw raid was running obscenely faster than the mylex and
> (some other brand that isn't 3ware) raids..
Our company has stopped recommending hardware raid for all low-to-medium end
systems. Our experience is that Linux SW RAID does as good a job as any
$700 to $1000 RAID card, and has the advantage of not having lots of driver
issues (for example, we still have one system running Linux 2.2.19 because
the Mylex driver maintainer passed away in early 2002).
The exception to this is if you are expecting to frequently max out your CPU
and/or RAM with your application, in which case the SW RAID might not be so
good because you would get query-vs.-RAID CPU contention.
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco