Hardware raid is a lot like the big brother of fake raid, nothing is worse besides the price and a few things are better, but still lacks a number of features that software raid has. The biggest positive for hardware raid is the os is presented the array as one disk. If you do not have a dedicated hardware raid controller, there are two utilities to be configured and started. This is a method of improving the performance and reliability of your storage media by using multiple drives. I have scoured through articles written about tuning software and i have used linux software raid for over 10 years. A raid can be deployed using both software and hardware. Provided you have enough machine resources cpu, ram, bus speed, and a good disk controller as a general rule, software raid will outperform hardware raid if the underlying software raid is designed well. Difference between hardware raid and software raid. It is a way to virtualize multiple, independent hard disk drives into one or more arrays to improve performance, capacity and reliability. So could i do a software raid 5 of 18 tb total 3x 6 tb. A brief history of raid raid has been around since 1970s 1989 berkeley paper was a taxonomy 1989 witnessed the first raid5 in software 1990s saw many hardware raid3, 5s lsi, 3ware, maxstrat, highpoint, intel. Ive ordered an areca 1280ml 24 port sata controller.
Verify your account to enable it peers to see that you are a professional. I made the two 100mb partitions a single raid 1 device, mounted on boot, and the other two a raid 1 device mounted on. Soft possibly the longest running battle in raid circles is which is faster, hardware raid or software raid. Ive been hoping other people would post with some experience, because im in the middle of a decision and am leaning toward software but just basically fear the unknown. But if you have a hardware raid use that over a software raid.
In testing both software and hardware raid performance i employed six 750gb samsung sata drives in three raid configurations 5, 6, and 10. A software raid is free but does carry some overhead on the server and may be less reliable under certain circumstances. Additionally, hardwareassisted software raid usually comes with a variety of drivers for the most popular operating systems, and therefore, is more os independent than pure software raid. Scott lowe responds to a techrepublic discussion and one members raid dilemma. While you might think the computer you are using is the most important part of your everyday and professional workflows, there is.
We returned a whole bunch, and just scrapped the ones we couldnt return. The raid can be implemented either using a special controller hardware raid, or by an operating system driver software raid. What is the difference between a software and hardware raid. Regarding raid1e and 10 the main difference between 1e and 10 is that 1e uses an odd number of disk for providing protection, where as 10 uses an even number of disk. It is used in modern gnulinux distributions in place of older software raid utilities such as raidtools2 or raidtools mdadm is free software maintained by, and ed to, neil brown of suse, and licensed under the terms of version 2 or later of the gnu general public license.
Its based on java, but can easily be called periodically from windows task scheduler, andor at system startup configuration and batch file is. The performance of a softwarebased array is dependent on the server cpu performance and load. Tips on striping, mirroring, and striping with parity. Nas or desktop hdd for raid 1 or windows software raid hi, i want to buy two new hdd for my raid 1 mirror in desktop to store my data. Hardware raids are more smb friendly than software raids. Here are some tips on raid levels and some feedback on the software vs. That is what the thread was about, mainly, will raid 1 benefit enough to justify the extra risk and investment for a hw controller.
Software vs hardware raid performance and cache usage. Raid hardware vs raid software what is your best option. Windows software raid vs hardware raid ars technica. Windows software raid vs hardware raid 10 posts arlesterc. Hardware raid presents logical disks that are already configured to the system or the san, mirrored and ready to go. The advantage of software raid is that your raid sets are not dependent on a certain controller or format and that you receive bugfixes and software updates easily through the software update process. With todays fast cpus, software raid performance can excel against hardware raid. When storage drives are connected directly to the motherboard without a raid controller, raid configuration is managed by utility software in the operating system, and thus referred to as a software raid setup. A redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability. There are no advantages to fake raid or expensive real hardware raid controllers that i know of.
Raid is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. But to appease the powers that be, i have explained the two below hardware raid is when you have a dedicated controller to do the work for you. A hp server that i work on had two disks in a raid1 array, one of my colleagues added an extra disk and made it a raid5, the hardware raid device moved the data around as appropriate while the machine was running and the disk space was expanded without any downtime. I dont care much about io rate, and care more about transfer. If your expected io rate is low, then software raid is safer than a budget hardware raid controller. Second, if your raid card fails, your raid volume fails.
Similarly, mdadm watches the health of your linux software raids for any problems. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a special raid controller inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. Software diffen technology computers software is a general term used to describe a collection of computer programs, procedures, and documentation that perform some task on a computer system. If your expected io rate is high, then hardware raid can offer better performance as the raid is offloaded to dedicated hardware. Do i let the card configure raid 6 or use linux raid.
The md driver in the linux kernel is an example of a raid solution that is completely hardware independent. A 4 disk 700gb raid5 volume was created using 3wares bios. Solved using both hardware and software raid together. Hardware redundant array of inexpensive disks raid and software raid are two main ways for setting up raid system. Software raid was created by first putting each disk in the 3ware bios into its own single volume. The term hardware raid usually is used for a system most commonly on a addon card that uses dedicated processor chips to manage the raid array, freeing the cpu entirely from involvement. Before raid was raid, software disk mirroring raid 1 was a huge profit generator for system vendors, who sold it as an addon to their operating systems. This is for large photoshop and tiff images, ranging from 250mb to as much as 1. When running basic io tests ddoflagdirect 5k to 100g files, hdparam t, etc.
Hardware raid is more expensive than software raid, but offers better performance and interoperability. This little utility monitors the health of your windows software raid. It is still software but running on a dedicated controller. I created two 100mb software raid primary paritions, one on each disk, two 512mb linux swap partitions, two 79gb paritions to fill the rest of the disk. Fake raid hardware raid is exactly what it sounds like a special hardware controller card manages the disks to provide the striping andor redundancy. Under software raid, that configuration is performed in the. You are correct, of course, in saying that you are not using some software raid as software from some third party, or even from. Software, hybrid some hardware with software checks, and hardware. Raid 1e requires min of 3 disk, and raid 10 requires a min of 4 disk. Comparing hardware raid vs software raid setups deals with how the storage drives in a raid array connect to the motherboard in a server or pc, and the management of those drives.
The drives are configured, so that the data is either divided between disks to distribute load, or duplicated to ensure that it can be recovered once a disk fails. This works the same for larger servers as well as desktop computers. It is used to improve disk io performance and reliability of your server or workstation. Solved hardware raid vs software lsi cards spiceworks. We used lsi megaraid sata raid controllers a couple years ago, and they left a very bad impression on us. They all use software, its just that on a hardware raid the software is hidden on a card that you plug into the computer, and the computer just sees a simulation of one piece of hardware. Personally i think the software and hybrid are a waste of time and misleading when claims of reliability are usually made.
Hardware raid still has the three key vulnerabilities it has always had. If anything they should be advised to increase ram and be done with it. Software raid means that the raid is handled by the general purpose os and hardware raid means that the raid is handled by a special purpose satasas controller card that runs its own os, cpu, memory, etc. Software raid has advanced significantly in the last few years as of 2012. I have no experience with middleoftheroad raid controllers like highpoint, promise, adaptec, etc so cant comment on those.
Raid stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. My experience with hardware and fakehardware raid is that as long as you stay with the same vendor, the raid metadata will be recognized ive seen this when moving drives between various hp, areca and lsi hardware raid controllers, and with intel, amd and even via hostraid i was pretty surprised when i connected a 250gb hard drive from some old amd desktop box to a hp g1 microserver, and. Unless you can replace a broken raid controller with a compatible you are not able to access your. Whether software raid vs hardware raid is the one for you depends on what you need to do and. Due to time constraints, we could only test xfs performance on the hardware raid. Raid redundant array of independent disks is one of the popular data storage virtualization technology. The key advantage of a full, dedicated hardware raid is that it requires no software or drivers. The mirrored then striped array is also known as raid 10.
In other raid configs it also allows for the array to be rebuilt with less of a performance hit on the os. First, hardware raid5 performance on the escalade was tested. It combines multiple inexpensive, small disk drives into an array of disks in order to provide redundancy, lower latency maximizing the chanc. Configuration is still required, but that configuration takes place outside the system. Hardware vs software difference and comparison diffen. For hardware raid, that cpu can be in a disk array or in a raid controller. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a raid controller card inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. Hardware raid controllers or even fake raid controllers are susceptible to failures of the raid controllers themselves. Out of curiosity, i decided to run the iozone tests i performed with a raid 10 see this post on a raidz and compare it to the raid 5 of the hardware raid controller. A hardware raid controller costs money but has no overhead on the server. You have a lowly d525 at your disposal, which is a decent enough little cpu for serving media etc, but its not going to win you any medals performing lots of xor calcs, so offloading that to a hardware solution such as an adaptec card is prolly a good idea.
Software raid is almost always a better choice than hardware raid. Benefits and drawbacks of hybrid, hardwareassisted software raid. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as raid levels. Another limitation of linux software raid is expanding raid groups. Im about to start a new server build for home media storage. As for the hardware vs software raid question, adaptec raid cards are good at what they do. This allows the raid adapter to deal with bad sectors and the best way to write data and read data. I will back up this drive to another single drive for prevention of data loss, but i wondered if i will get faster readswrites with hardware raid 0 vs. But the real question is whether you should use a hardware raid solution or a software raid solution. Lets start the hardware vs software raid battle with the hardware side. The terms hardware raid and software raid are very misleading as all raid controllers do raid using software.
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