Topic: Software RAID - Performance hit?

[ed hunter]

I'm converting from NT with a hardware RAID mirroring setup using the Highpoint HP372 controller on my Abit motherboard... from reading the boards it appears SME 6 will not install on this hardware RAID system. I'm interested in setting up a software raid, wondering how much of a performance hit I'll take...  The machine is basically a file server for a 11 user network in a veterinary hospital.  Current machine is an Athlon 1.4ghz with 1gig ram...
thanks, ed

[wyron]

Well, changing from RAID 5 to RAID 1 will always hit you in terms of performance.
But I'm running a SME server 6.0 on an old Asus P2B-LS board with a 400Mhz processor, 512 Mbytes RAM and two WD 60 Gb disks, without any real problems.
Mind you: Filetransfer of large files can be a tedious business. Otherwise - no probs.

[hordeusr]

http://www.accusys.com.tw/prod.htm
I'm using the 7500, it has 2 drives mirrored.  It's OS independent--the motherboard see's it as one drive.  The 7630 would let you do raid 5.  The hot swap and online rebuilding is nice.  If a drive quits you have no downtime.  Even better is the Acuta.  4 drives...raid 5 plus spare.  External.  Must have S-ATA for that one though.

[edform]

I'm converting from NT with a hardware RAID mirroring setup using the Highpoint HP372 controller on my Abit motherboard... from reading the boards it appears SME 6 will not install on this hardware RAID system. I'm interested in setting up a software raid, wondering how much of a performance hit I'll take...  The machine is basically a file server for a 11 user network in a veterinary hospital.  Current machine is an Athlon 1.4ghz with 1gig ram...
thanks, ed

The Highpoint controller makes absolutely no difference to the disk performance of your system - to be more precise, the biggest change in performance I could find on several boards fitted with these things [mostly Abit KT7A RAID] was less than 0.3%, and I'm not actually convinced it was real. That was running the system as a stripe. In mirror format the change was to lower disk performance by a very small amount relative to running one of the two disks alone on the primary IDE port.

Software mirror in SME has a very low apparent overhead, so you are unlikely to see very much change when you make the swap.

Ed Form

[.]

... hardware RAID mirroring setup using the Highpoint HP372 controller ... SME 6 will not install on this hardware RAID system.

It's not HW RAID at all. It's a pretend HW RAID controller. I doubt anyone will write a Unix driver for it as it's well known as an underperforming heap of junk.

Use SW RAID or get a real HW controller like a 3Ware.