From owner-freebsd-stable Sun May 26 22: 0:59 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from panzer.kdm.org (panzer.kdm.org [216.160.178.169]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2558837B404 for ; Sun, 26 May 2002 22:00:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from ken@localhost) by panzer.kdm.org (8.11.6/8.9.1) id g4R50o708120; Sun, 26 May 2002 23:00:50 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from ken) Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 23:00:50 -0600 From: "Kenneth D. Merry" To: Phil Rosenthal Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hardware RAID vs vinum Message-ID: <20020526230050.A8026@panzer.kdm.org> References: <004701c20530$68e98a20$0700a8c0@zoom> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i In-Reply-To: <004701c20530$68e98a20$0700a8c0@zoom>; from winter@villaweb.net on Sun, May 26, 2002 at 11:41:39PM -0400 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 23:41:39 -0400, Phil Rosenthal wrote: > I've been using vinum for about a year now, and have been using it on some > pretty large, heavily accessed RAID5 file system (500GB & 70MBits/sec > constantly ). > Is there any reason why a hardware raid would be better, am I missing out on > anything? As someone else mentioned, CPU utilization, and possibly features, depending on the RAID card. > What hardware RAID cards are best under FreeBSD 4.6? I would recommend an Adaptec 5400S. It has a hardware parity engine to accelerate RAID-5 parity calculations, so writes will be faster than on a RAID card without a parity engine. On the read side, I've seen one of those cards pump out 175MBytes/sec. (under NT, the guy doing the test didn't have FreeBSD installed), and I think the benchmarks claim it can do up to 190MB/sec on reads. (From looking at the benchmark web page, it looks like they only got 160MB/sec, but since I've seen it go faster I think that's a tad low.) Writes are obviously slower, but the parity engine helps speed things up. The card also does well with high transaction loads. (disclaimer: I work for Adaptec) Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@kdm.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message