From: Joshua Baker-LePain jlb17@duke.edu

I'm in the midst of testing a dual 9500-12 based system, and I've got all sorts of results (I posted tiobench numbers for XFS and ext3 recently).

Until the Escalade 9500S series matures, I've been recommending the following:

3Ware Escalade 7506/8506 for RAID-10. 3Ware Escalade 7506/8506 for RAID-5 when it is largely a read-only setup. LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 300-8X (XScale) for RAID-5.

Unless you absolutely need the maximum disk efficiency of RAID-5, or you have 99% reads (e.g., typical MySQL Internet server), then RAID-10 is often far better than RAID-5.

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org