On Wed, 25 Jun 2008, Merlin Moncure wrote:
Has anyone done some benchmarks between hardware RAID vs Linux MD software
RAID?

I have here:
http://merlinmoncure.blogspot.com/2007/08/following-are-results-of-our-testing-of.html

The upshot is I don't really see a difference in performance.

The main difference is that you can get hardware RAID with battery-backed-up cache, which means small writes will be much quicker than software RAID. Postgres does a lot of small writes under some use cases.

Without a BBU cache, it is sensible to put the transaction logs on a separate disc system to the main database, to make the transaction log writes fast (due to no seeking on those discs). However, with a BBU cache, that advantage is irrelevant, as the cache will absorb the writes.

However, not all hardware RAID will have such a battery-backed-up cache, and those that do tend to have a hefty price tag.

Matthew

--
$ rm core
Segmentation Fault (core dumped)

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