[CentOS] 4.4/64-bit Supermicro/ Nvidia RAID [thanks]

[Feizhou]

>> Hardware raid is not necessarily faster than software raid. If you are 
>> going to do raid5...make sure your card has plenty of cache. However, 
>> that may be moot anyway unless you use some filesystem other than 
>> ext3...is it a 3ware card? 3ware + RAID5 + ext3 = slow.
> 
> 
> Well, I had them ship me a 3ware 9550 card, and yes, am using ext3, 
> -there's no onboard battery backup module, so the write cache is 
> disabled.  So this would be slow then?  Am using this as a Java 
> Development machine.

Disabling write cache will slow you down big time if you have a lot of 
I/O. If you don't, it probably does not matter.

> 
> Any suggestions as to the filesystem type that would work best?  I'll 
> order a battery backup unit so we can proceed and enable write cache.

Since you are running 64-bit Centos, I guess using the plus kernel and 
the XFS filesystem should do you good. XFS has the best write 
performance and it sings on the 3ware.