Steve Bergman <steve at rueb.com> wrote: > Good points as to the advantages of software RAID. > This machine is fully certified by RedHat, but the > CERC 6ch controller is uncertain, The CERC 6ch uses the aaraid driver. Administrative tools are largely lacking though. It's also an old Intel i960-based design, so it's rather sluggish. At RAID-5 its so-so, the i960 is a bit of a bottleneck with today's drives. But at RAID-0, 1 or 10, the i960 will be a massive bottleneck. > so software RAID seems the right choice. The question is, how are you going to do software RAID? Are you going to use the AIC-7xxx SCSI channels on the CERC 6ch? If that does bypass the sluggish i960, then it would probably be faster at RAID-5 and far, far faster at RAID-0, 1 or 10. But if you have to put the i960 in JBOD mode, the i960 still might be a bottleneck to the SCSI channels. Which means you're not going to see any better performance, so you might want to just use the i960 hardware RAID. [ SIDE NOTE: This is why I don't like generalized RAID discussions. How to do RAID is a question of what hardware you have -- for _both_ software or hardware. ] -- Bryan J. Smith | Sent from Yahoo Mail mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org | (please excuse any http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ | missing headers)