[CentOS] Re: IHC7 RAID-1 or Kernel Software RAID-1?

Tue Jul 17 20:05:30 UTC 2007
Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com>

Tony Mountifield spake the following on 7/17/2007 10:32 AM:
> 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
I won't go into the whole "fakeraid" rant, but the software raid drivers are
very mature and have been working well for years, but the dmraid code is much
newer, and probably not quite as stable.

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