Re: Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
On 13:04 Fri 20 Jan , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Based on your post to my other thread I've been looking at the drives you mentioned. What do you know about the WD Caviar drives? They are cheaper than the Raptors. I try to avoid Western Digital in general, except for the Raptors. I had bad experiences with them when teaching Windows networking. The Raptors are expensive because of the speed, 10,000 rpm vs. 7,200 rpm. They are supposed to be built more ruggedly, an attempt by Western Digital to steal some of high profit SCSI market. I can only say I've been running them for a year or more, and they have performed flawlessly. For slower drives, I prefer Seagate, because of their reputation. Don't know if they are really that much better. See: http://www.hardwareguys.com The other brand I avoid is IBM Deskstars, aka Deathstars. The brand has moved to Hitachi, I believe. They had so many problems, it was killing their business. I think they may have done some re-engineering, maybe they are not bad now, but I don't trust them anymore. Good luck. Bill Roberts pgpAiIKMhTs3j.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 08:16:42 -0500, Bill Roberts wrote: The Raptors are expensive because of the speed, 10,000 rpm vs. 7,200 rpm. They are supposed to be built more ruggedly, an attempt by Western Digital to steal some of high profit SCSI market. The WD Raptors were made for that market, they originally only came with SCSI interfaces. Now they have SATA versions, I'll consider them next time I need new drives. -- Neil Bothwick A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
O 13:33 Thu 19 Jan , Brett I. Holcomb wrote: I'm moving from SCSI to SATA and was wondering if anyone has any experience with the speed of software RAID vs hardware RAID. I'm currently using hardware RAID. I've have two Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150, set up in a software RAID0. My hdparm gives me: /dev/md0: Timing cached reads: 2776 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1387.91 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 398 MB in 3.00 seconds = 132.48 MB/sec For redundancy I use backups to a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3300831AS 300GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive. Blazing speed with the raptors, lower speed, lower cost for the backups. Good luck. Bill Roberts pgpBOvMMTTbz5.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
Based on your post to my other thread I've been looking at the drives you mentioned. What do you know about the WD Caviar drives? They are cheaper than the Raptors. From: Bill Roberts [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 2006/01/20 Fri AM 09:52:01 EST To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
On Thursday 19 January 2006 18:33, Brett I. Holcomb wrote: I'm moving from SCSI to SATA and was wondering if anyone has any experience with the speed of software RAID vs hardware RAID. I'm currently using hardware RAID. Yesterday an IBM ServeRAID decided to mark it's 3 SCSI disks as defunct when they are all in fact perfectly fine, giving me a 4am finish this morning after the major hassle of rebuilding, so I'm now heavily biased against hardware RAID, when I know software RAID is fully capable. Plus, mdadm can give you all the information you could ever need, and bugs get squashed quickly. http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5181 I think the general consensus is that now CPUs are so cheap, and so powerful, that they can quite easily offset the extra horsepower needed, unless your workload is heavily CPU bound. None of the workloads on any of my servers are heavily CPU bound, so apart from this one server that came with the card (though an acquision of another company), all my RAID needs (on some 16 servers) are done in software. -- Mike Williams -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
Thanks for the in-the-field experience. My feeling was as you indicated that CPUs are cheap and powerful so they can do the work. However, I like to hear from others who have been there! On Thursday January 19 2006 14:39, Mike Williams wrote: On Thursday 19 January 2006 18:33, Brett I. Holcomb wrote: I'm moving from SCSI to SATA and was wondering if anyone has any experience with the speed of software RAID vs hardware RAID. I'm currently using hardware RAID. I think the general consensus is that now CPUs are so cheap, and so powerful, that they can quite easily offset the extra horsepower needed, unless your workload is heavily CPU bound. -- Mike Williams -- Brett I. Holcomb -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
Mike Williams wrote: Yesterday an IBM ServeRAID decided to mark it's 3 SCSI disks as defunct when they are all in fact perfectly fine, giving me a 4am finish this morning after the major hassle of rebuilding, so I'm now heavily biased against hardware RAID, when I know software RAID is fully capable. Plus, mdadm can give you all the information you could ever need, and bugs get squashed quickly. http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5181 I think the general consensus is that now CPUs are so cheap, and so powerful, that they can quite easily offset the extra horsepower needed, unless your workload is heavily CPU bound. None of the workloads on any of my servers are heavily CPU bound, so apart from this one server that came with the card (though an acquision of another company), all my RAID needs (on some 16 servers) are done in software. Both software and hardware RAIDs can and will flake at some point so it's a toss up there. I find hardware a bit easier to work with as I never need to mess with grub and whatnot to get things to boot correctly. CPU is just part of the equation in RAID. Assuming I/O is your biggest problem having a nice 256MB cache on the raid card can change expensive short writes into nice long writes can really help an underperforming server. I'd say if you want raid for better fault tolerance stay with software raid. If you also need performance spend the money and get a decent RAID card. Do not get the lame ass winmodem raid cards. You'll have driver issues and they basically emulate a software raid badly. kashani -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
On Jan 19, 2006, at 2:23 PM, kashani wrote: Mike Williams wrote: Yesterday an IBM ServeRAID decided to mark it's 3 SCSI disks as defunct when they are all in fact perfectly fine, giving me a 4am finish this morning after the major hassle of rebuilding, so I'm now heavily biased against hardware RAID, when I know software RAID is fully capable. Plus, mdadm can give you all the information you could ever need, and bugs get squashed quickly. http://bugzilla.kernel.org/ show_bug.cgi?id=5181 I think the general consensus is that now CPUs are so cheap, and so powerful, that they can quite easily offset the extra horsepower needed, unless your workload is heavily CPU bound. None of the workloads on any of my servers are heavily CPU bound, so apart from this one server that came with the card (though an acquision of another company), all my RAID needs (on some 16 servers) are done in software. Both software and hardware RAIDs can and will flake at some point so it's a toss up there. I find hardware a bit easier to work with as I never need to mess with grub and whatnot to get things to boot correctly. CPU is just part of the equation in RAID. Assuming I/O is your biggest problem having a nice 256MB cache on the raid card can change expensive short writes into nice long writes can really help an underperforming server. I'd say if you want raid for better fault tolerance stay with software raid. If you also need performance spend the money and get a decent RAID card. Do not get the lame ass winmodem raid cards. You'll have driver issues and they basically emulate a software raid badly. if you do go with software raid...make DARN sure you get grub installed on both drives, or you're wasting your time. (can you tell i've been down that road)? I personally prefer hardware raid, because if you go software raid, I don't believe your /boot partition can exist on the raid. so each drive would have to have a /boot partitionor has that need been alleviated? kashani -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
John Jolet wrote: I personally prefer hardware raid, because if you go software raid, I don't believe your /boot partition can exist on the raid. so each drive would have to have a /boot partitionor has that need been alleviated? Not true. Of course /boot can be on raid too, but in case of linux software raid it can be only raid1 (which in case of small /boot partition does not matter). All other partitions can be in raid0,1,5... Jarry -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
On Jan 19, 2006, at 3:02 PM, Jarry wrote: John Jolet wrote: I personally prefer hardware raid, because if you go software raid, I don't believe your /boot partition can exist on the raid. so each drive would have to have a /boot partitionor has that need been alleviated? Not true. Of course /boot can be on raid too, but in case of linux software raid it can be only raid1 (which in case of small /boot partition does not matter). All other partitions can be in raid0,1,5... My apologies. My software raid testing WAS with raid5. Thanks for the correction. Jarry -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
I am currently dual booting Gentoo and Windoze on an SATA RAID 0. My boot partition is installed on the RAID as the two hard drives are the only bootable media I have in my system. I was able to get it going thanks in large part to this topic on the forum: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-354878-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html I've been playing with Linux for about a year and a half and Gentoo is the first Distro that I have been able to get to run on my hardware how I want (or at all). I'm fairly convinced that with enough time you can pretty much get this distro to do what ever you want, but this is besides the point. Basically I'm just trying to point out the fact that you can run your boot partition from the RAID 0 with no additional media required to boot. From: Jarry [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 22:02:42 +0100 John Jolet wrote: I personally prefer hardware raid, because if you go software raid, I don't believe your /boot partition can exist on the raid. so each drive would have to have a /boot partitionor has that need been alleviated? Not true. Of course /boot can be on raid too, but in case of linux software raid it can be only raid1 (which in case of small /boot partition does not matter). All other partitions can be in raid0,1,5... Jarry -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID
I am running it on the ICH6 software raid just for clarification. From: Christopher Mosher [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 22:36:28 -0600 I am currently dual booting Gentoo and Windoze on an SATA RAID 0. My boot partition is installed on the RAID as the two hard drives are the only bootable media I have in my system. I was able to get it going thanks in large part to this topic on the forum: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-354878-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html I've been playing with Linux for about a year and a half and Gentoo is the first Distro that I have been able to get to run on my hardware how I want (or at all). I'm fairly convinced that with enough time you can pretty much get this distro to do what ever you want, but this is besides the point. Basically I'm just trying to point out the fact that you can run your boot partition from the RAID 0 with no additional media required to boot. From: Jarry [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] SATA Hardware vs Software RAID Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 22:02:42 +0100 John Jolet wrote: I personally prefer hardware raid, because if you go software raid, I don't believe your /boot partition can exist on the raid. so each drive would have to have a /boot partitionor has that need been alleviated? Not true. Of course /boot can be on raid too, but in case of linux software raid it can be only raid1 (which in case of small /boot partition does not matter). All other partitions can be in raid0,1,5... Jarry -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
