[PlanetCCRMA] software raid a good idea?

[Robert Foreman]

I'm not familiar with the ICH7 raid chip specifically, but there is a
performance hit for Raid 1 mirroring--especially for write intensive
applications. Technically one could improve performance using Raid 0,
but of course there's no data protection/redundancy with Raid 0 and if
it is across multiple disks you can actually create more than one point
of failure. I have heard software raid in Linux can actually outperform
many of the low-end raid chips on the market these days. With a good
processor software raid should at least hold its own against the cheaper
hardware raid chips. However, if possible, I usually use a smaller disk
as a system disk and a larger (preferably fast) disk as my "audio" disk.
It could be configured and mounted as /home for example, or any other
mount point as long as you have read/write permissions to it and record
everything there i.e. /audio or /home/audio or /mnt/audio whatever.

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 19:36 -0600, Chris Howard wrote:
> I purchased a second identical SATA drive for my new
> system (Dell E510)  The motherboard has ICH7 raid on it.
> 
> But from what I read, I can't get that running with FC4.
> I'm not sure I have the knowledge to attempt an FC5
> install of planetCCRMA at this point.
> 
> Should I  
> 1 - forget raid (mirroring) and just use it as a second drive
> 2 - wrestle with FC5
> 3 - go with software raid
> 
> ?
> 
> Are there performance penalties for using either the ICH7 or the
> software raid for mirroring?
> 
> Chris
> 
> 
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