On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 1:28 AM, Scott Marlowe<scott.marlowe@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> $750 is about what a decent RAID controller would cost you, but again
> it's likely that given your bulk import scenario, you're probably ok
> without one. In this instance, you're probably best off with software
> RAID than a cheap RAID card which will cost extra and probably be
> slower than linux software RAID.
Fwiw the main disadvantage of software raid is NOT speed -- Linux
software RAID is very fast. Aside from raid-5 where it lets you
offload the parity calculation there really isn't much speed benefit
to hardware raid.
The main advantage of hardware raid is the error handling. When you
get low level errors or pull a drive a lot of consumer level
controllers and their drivers don't respond very well and have long
timeouts or keep retrying tragically unaware that the software raid
would be able to handle recoverying. A good server-class RAID
controller should handle those situations without breaking a sweat.
--
greg
http://mit.edu/~gsstark/resume.pdf