Re: HPT370 RAID-1 or Software RAID-1, what's "best"?

[Mike Fedyk]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 05:43:38PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Hardware RAID is indeed better, but what you get using HPT370 IDE
> > controlelr is not hardware raid at all. Just read the code of the driver.
> > You get a software raid, period.
> 
> Its not always that simple either.
> 
> Software raid on aic7xxx totally blows away the Dell/AMI megaraid card I
> have, to the point the megaraid now resides in my testing bucket. The promise
> Supertrak 100 (now superceded by the SX6000) is also slower than the
> software IDE raid, but does use less CPU in RAID5 mode.
> 
> Some hardware raid cards do seem to be winners. The Dell Perc2/QC aacraid
> based boards (233Mhz ARM etc) really shift. When I've had the chance to
> borrow the disks to test I've seen it running over 100Mbytes/second. It
> also supports nice stuff like online reconfiguration of active volumes.
> [$$stupid from Dell $$notalot from ebay ;)]

Yep, but the aacraid controllers based on i960 don't do so well.  I was able
to double my throughput after switching to software raid (it acts like an
aic7xxx in scsi mode, even using the adaptec driver instead of aacraid).

Mike