On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Phillip Partipilo <[email protected]> wrote: > Those are almost always software RAIDs, so your CPU would be doing all of > the parity processing on RAID5 so performance there would quite suck.
It depends on the workload (and just how crappy the fake RAID implementation is). A lot of systems spend most of their CPU time idle, so using that for RAID doesn't hurt you much. Over in the land of Linux, for example, OS software RAID performance often blows even the best dedicated RAID hardware out of the water. (It helps that Linux's RAID implementation doesn't suck anywhere near as much as Windows' does.) I wouldn't do it on a web transaction host, SQL box, etc., but if it's a file server, static web content server, proxy cache, etc., sure. But given that the OP later states it's a gaming box, yah, I agree: Steer clear from fake/host/software RAID. >There appears very low overhead striping in a RAID0 ... At the cost of doubling your chance of system failure due to disk trouble. These days, I wouldn't touch RAID 0 with a ten foot cattle prod. > when you created a RAID1 set, it would read the data in > a striping pattern, essentially doubling read performance. Any decent RAID 1 implementation will do that. See above about implementations that suck. ;-) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
