I'm just setting up a SuperMicro system which has twin SATA disks on an Intel IHC7 RAID-capable controller.
The system came with Fedora 5 pre-installed, which I will be removing and replacing with CentOS 4.5. But before doing so, I've been having a look at how the original vendor configured it.
When I've built systems previously, I've disabled any RAID controller and used kernel software RAID-1, set up per-partition, and this has worked well.
This system is currently set up with hardware RAID enabled, which is detected by the kernel device mapper. I can see what it has found using "dmraid" with -b, -r and -s. A single physical volume was created on the mapped RAID-1 device, and then logical volumes created on that.
My question is: which kind of configuration will generally give me better performance? To use the IHC7 RAID-1 as currently set up, or to use Linux software RAID-1 as I am used to doing? Any other reasons to choose one over the other?
Thanks in advance for any insights.
Cheers Tony