8 Dec
2006
8 Dec
'06
9:59 p.m.
Hardware raid is not necessarily faster than software raid.
hardware raid with battery-backed writeback cache is HUGELY faster at the very critical synchronous commit (fsync()) operations required by transactional database servers. so it all depends on what your application requirements are. if you just care about single threaded sequential reads, you'll probably do best with software SATA RAID10 on SATA. if you need fast random access committed writes, then you need a raid card with cache, and a battery so that you can safely enable writeback caching in the controller.