Good Day Everyone,
I have recently been able to install debian woody using a non-standard installer which supports varius RAID device drivers during installation. The Hardware RAID controller I used is the HighPoint RocketRaid Parallel ATA 133 controller, which has 4 channels -- good for up to 4 ATA 133 hard disks.
It stated out good, but then I had a certain problem regarding the performance of the RAID 1 implementation on this particular RAID controller.
It took around 45 minutes to write the inode structure of an ext3 filesystem for a pair of 80 gb hard drives... And that's not just it -- it takes me close to 3 hours to download and install the packages for the base debian system from CDROM. Yes, from CDROM.
Aside from that, I feel that the RAID controller (connected via PCI) is hogging up the PCI bandwidth of the server, which in turn competes with the network device (NIC). I might be wrong, but my gut feeling and comsci subject on computer architecture tells me to think that way.
Does anybody have the same performance frustrations with hardware RAID? I mean, compared to sftware RAID using your friendly neighborhood standard high performance IDE controller, I get really good performance from a P4 2.8 Ghz based 1GB RAM powered server. Software RAID 1 was so much better than hardware based RAID 1, that I'm not even considering it (hardware RAID) anymore unless it comes with hotswapping capabilities, and a separate rackmountable casing.
Any remedies? Anything will be most appreciated.
TIA
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