chrism at imntv.com wrote: > Feizhou wrote: >> William Warren wrote: >>> as soon as you goto software raid 5 you'll get a good performance >>> hit. Head for the hardware raid cards then. You can get the 3ware >>> ide cards for 150 or less now. >> >> don't know if it is still the case but ext3 + 3ware + ext3 = ultra >> slow. you'd want to use XFS or some other filesystem... argh...i missed the raid5 on 3ware part. > > I keep hearing about this "slowness" thing. Here is a bonnie++ run on > one of my spare machines. This particular machine is also running 4 > copies of Folding at Home in the background during the test. The array > being tested is on a 3Ware 9550 card with 8 500gig barracudas. The > filesystem is a standard ext3 filesystem with zero tweaks. It doesn't > appear that slow to me, but perhaps I'm just easy to please. <shrug> You are free to not believe or to believe. Maybe the latest Centos 4 kernel has a fix or something but ext3 + 3ware raid5 = slow while XFS would fly. Are your 8 500GB configured in raid5 or raid10? If it is raid10, then yes, it will fly. You switch to raid5 however and you will experience a slow down. This is not limited to 3ware boards lower than 95xx which suffer from lack of onboard memory to make things fly.