On Nov 15, 2007 9:29 AM, Ben Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto ("Fake" raid is soft raid, > nothing really fake about it) > I don't know why software RAID does not get more respect these days. When > processors were just babies, > hardware raid was needed for reasonable performance, but now soft raid is > really fast, unless you're comparing > it with enterprise-grade NAS setups. IMO soft raid is fine for non-SCSI > RAIDs :)
Just a clarification on this point. Fakeraid is (every time I've seen it, anyway..) used to refer to raid cards that claim to have RAID, but actually offload all the raid functionality to the host machine via a driver. Most of these cards only have a firmware program to manage the drives, nothing else is done in hardware. Hence the name Fakeraid, it looks like hardware raid, but it's not, it's fake. This is also sometimes called firmware raid. A very small percentage (I only know of one) of these cards also have a hardware XOR engine for offloading the work required for Raid 5. Ooohhh... Fakeraid+ :) My rule of thumb is to use true hardware when it's available, and to require it in "important" servers. Failing that, I use software raid. You get 80-90% of the performance of hardware raid in most use cases, and management is consistent from machine to machine. The "middleground" Fakeraid gets you none of the performance advantages of true hardware raid since everything is offloaded to the host anyway, and introduces a whole bunch of vendor-specific complications, so I avoid it entirely. -- -Regards- -Quentin Hartman-
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