[CentOS] Software versus hardware RAID performance.

[Feizhou]

> Ok, the two 72GB drives are set up RAID1, and the four 146GB drives are set up 
> striped, RAID0.  The two 72's are on channel 1, and the four 146's are on 
> channel 2.  Under CentOS 4 with the hardware RAID running, the four 146's 
> (hardware RAID0) have a raw read performance of abut 150MB/s, which I thought 
> was pretty good. 
> 
> Now, the box has dual 3GHz Xeons (it needs them for the pulsar dedispersion 
> algorithm's FFT's, particularly when we refine it to do dedispersion in 
> real-time).  With FC5 installed, and the four 146's running software RAID0, I 
> am getting nearly 240MB/s throughput (with other processes running).  The box 
> feels significantly more responsive; the GNUradio build with the PERC running 
> in hardware RAID mode took about thirty minutes; with it running in LSI MPT 
> SCSI mode it's taking half that time to build and install.

> Just thought I drop this data point in.

/me wonders whether that Dell RAID system was using Intel i960 cpus :P