[CentOS] SATA RAID card recommendation?

[Florin Andrei]

Andrew Cotter wrote:
> 
> What are you trying to build?

Analysis and reporting tool with a large MySQL backend. It also serves 
as a transient backup server for that data. I need MySQL to _fly_ on 
that RAID array, since the data set is pretty big.
I wrote pretty much all software and did the DB schema, so I have true 
full control over what's running on that machine.

I think I can go with the "throw more hardware (bigger disks) at the 
problem" approach and use RAID1 instead of RAID5. That should give a 
boost to the read performance, in theory.
I need to do some tests and figure out what works best in this 
particular case.

I was wrong with the requirements, it's not PCI, it's PCI Express x16

There's not much room in the system, it's a 1U. I think I can fit a 
full-height card in it, but it must not be too bulky.

It's a fairly new AMD 64bit machine. It will run CentOS 4.4 64bit, 
possibly version 5 if the project drags its feet long enough and 5 is 
released soon, and MySQL makes "official" packages for CentOS 5 soon 
enough and is stable enough. Hm, that's a lot of ifs. :-/

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/