On Wed, 08 Mar 2000, Brian Pomerantz wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 12:44:32AM +0100, Jakob �stergaard wrote:
> >
> > You don't _think_ you would see better performance ?
> >
> > I'm pretty sure you will see better performance. But on the other
> > hand, with a large number of disks, sometimes the hot-swap
> > capability comes in handy, and sometimes it's just nice to have a
> > red light flashing next to the disk that died. Hardware RAID
> > certainly still has it's niche :) - it's just usually not the
> > performance one.
> >
>
> If there isn't hot-swap RAID 5 with auto rebuild, it will never
> happen.
I meant; SW usually has really good performance, not HW is unsuitable for HPC.
Anyway I had the impression that you were looking for the hightes possible
performance from RAID-0 sets. I see from your reply that I misunderstood the
proportions of your storage needs.
Sure with external storage solutions, it may still be far the easiest to use a
simple interconnect and let the external disk solution take care of the RAID
logic. And given what one will have to pay for this anyway, going SW is
probably not the way to cut costs in half.
SW RAID is beautiful for a handfull or three of disks, but when you're working
with hundreds of disks the administrative costs of not-so-flexible-if-any
hotswap is a killer. I still maintain that it would be interesting to see
software RAID-0 on this size of systems though, as hotswap usually doesn't
matter so much on RAID-0 anyway. That will be a 2.4 task though, as the
SW RAID in 2.2 is not able to handle this number of disks.
It would be nice if a program such as ASCI could put the resources needed
into Linux to actually get decent hot swap capability... Let's see what
happens.
Cheers,
--
................................................................
: [EMAIL PROTECTED] : And I see the elder races, :
:.........................: putrid forms of man :
: Jakob �stergaard : See him rise and claim the earth, :
: OZ9ABN : his downfall is at hand. :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............:
