Hosting again

[Simon Elliott]

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-----Original Message-----
From: Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk>
Sent: 01 November 2007 13:32
To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers <london.pm at london.pm.org>
Subject: Re: Hosting again

Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> 
> Given Adaptec have managed to release some of the most  shamelessly crap 
> bits of RAID kit I've ever had the misfortune to use,

Yes, but they were not alone.

> 
> 3ware/Compaq/Mylex hardware raid >
> software RAID >
> Crappy hardware RAID that's really software RAID and/or Adaptec
>

Depends what you want. Unless the processors in RAID cards have been 
significantly beefed up in recent hardware - if it is speed you want - 
then software raid wins hands down all the time.

The last time I did some serious benchmarking (3 or 4 years ago now) 
software raid beat so called "enterprise" raid hardware - in speed - 
(both read and write) by a factor of between 4 and 5 (depending on raid 
card manufacturer). IIRC I tested again high end Adaptec and Compaq raid 
cards as installed in Dell and Compaq servers respectively. Ironically 
this benchmarking was done using the same card either as a raid 
controller or just plain scsi. Software raid was always much faster.

Sadly though, software raid was harder to setup, to maintain and to 


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