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hardware or software based raid 5 card irrelevant

R

Rix2357

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 15, 2001
Messages
1,274
I am now wondering if it matters if I need a hardware based raid card anymore. With dual core becoming mainstream, I think hardware based cards may actually hinder performance as a modern day cpu can compute the xor bit many times faster than the processor located on the hardware based controller card. Anyone have any experience in this matter? I was almost ready to plunk down the cash for an areca 8 port raid card using PCI-E, but now I am wondering if it is even necessary since I could use software raid with an almost finished dual core setup. The only feature I could see that I may miss is the online storage expansion feature, and I am not sure if the Areca card even has that feature. Plus it seems like hardware raid cards have dismal write performance (<12MB/s) as some users have posted in this forum.
 
The write performance is just an issue of dealing with RAID 5, it's the nature of the beast. A dedicated card has it's advantages. Most software cards I've seen can't hold their own under heavy system load. If you work with anything that uses alot of cpu cycles the hardware card will win out everytime. The other advantage of a nice hardware raid 5 is if something goes wrong with the card, you can usually swap it for the exact same card and get it back up and running without an issue. Even so much as switching the raid to another system altogether.
 
The number of drives, type of usage, amount of usage, etc, all play into the consideration for this.

Good RAID 5 cards can cost quite a bit, so you have to weigh the benefits vs the cost.

Just don't buy a Promise card. (Personal experience with them on high end RAID cards, they suck goat balls.)
 
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