kashani wrote:
Doug Brown wrote:
My mobo's chipset (nvidia nf 4) doesn't support raid real well, and I
have read that Linux Software raid is very good. I am getting ready
to install Gentoo 2005.1 64bit real soon (I am new to Gentoo), and I
was wondering what types of raid it supports. I know it supports 0
and 1, but I am more interested in raid 0+1 and 1+0.
Linux software raid is capable of doing all the usual stuff as
well as RAID 0+1 or 1+0. I'd want a RAID 0 stripe of mirrored RAID 1
sets rather than mirroring two RAID 0 sets, but my requirements may
not be yours.
Assuming this is a small home system I'd go with RAID 5 with maybe
a hot spare if I have more than four drives in a normal server setting
where reads happen more often than writes. That's more space with
comparable performance for anything you're likely to be doing. If you
really need the performance spend the money on a real RAID card with
local cache. The difference is night and day.
kashani
RAID 5 support in Linux is good. I have been using RAID-5 for my home
fileserver (4x40GB IDE disks) and it has worked flawlessly, and has been
a lifesaver when one of my drives failed.
I have a page devoted to setting up RAID on linux quickly (gentoo and
debian) , you can find it at http://ziva-vatra.dnsalias.com/~ognen/
under "Software RAID5 Project". And if you want more info look at the
"RAID Overview" Section.
Linux kernel 2.6 has added support for new RAID levels (including
RAID6) but some people are saying that other RAID Implementations (such
as RAID-5) have better performance on the 2.4 kernels.
I have found Linux Software RAID very useful and reliable. While
probably being beaten in the performance area by hardware
implementations, I have to say it does do the job well, and I have no
issues using it both in my home server and in Commercial implementations
(have used RAID-5 and RAID-1 software with 5 SCSI drives on a dual PIII
Gentoo LTSP server, it worked well, but there were issues regarding the
SCSI hardware (like no hotplug support for the disks) ).
Google about, and look at the gentoo-wiki site.
Essentially it depends on what you are looking from your RAID setup. For
me it was re-using componets I already had and price (it cost me a total
of £8 to build my RAID Setup). Performance was not an issue because my
two 10mbit networks (one wireless @ 11mbit) were unlikely to push the
RAID performance to its limits.
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