From: "Geo." 

"Robert Comer"  wrote in message
news:3ebd4188$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> > Why was the guy suggesting ext2 then?
>
> It's the oldest stable file system and it's not journeyed, good for a
> benchmark, but not good for real work.

bingo.

> I also have a software raid 1 server and it's a DOG -- very much slower
than
> the same machine not mirrored.  (it's scsi with decently fast drives, but
> certainly not the latest and greatest.)  Lots of memory can help here
> though....

I've never had an issue with mirroring slowing a machine compared to a
single drive setup except at boot when the drives are synced. My mail
servers used to be mirrored until I moved to hardware RAID5 on both. I
didn't move because I wanted RAID5 either btw, I just wanted the disk speed
(faster than single disks) and I had the spare boxes sitting idle.

> >It's one of the reasons I'm using mirroring on a number of web
> > servers now, cheap redundancy.
>
> If disk speed isn't the most critical thing it makes sense.

Disk speed on a web server is the bottleneck, however mirrored compared to
a single drive makes very little difference.

> I'll take a hw RAID 5 array anytime, if there's budget for it anyway.

Well yeah, because it's faster than a single drive. RAID0 is faster than
RAID5 though but I don't imagine you want to run that on your fileserver do
you? .

I did a test with software RAID0 way back in the 486 days on a workstation
running Autocad. Blalock couldn't believe how fast I had autocad starting
up on that box... RAID0 is great for that where you don't care about the
info on the local disks (a simple backup/restore is sufficient to satisfy
redundancy requirements).

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-4