From: "Robert Comer" 

> 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.

The server I'm talking about runs Oracle, so disk speed is critical...
(It's officially out of that job now and only runs as a WINS server right
now, The Oracle app is long gone...)

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

Like I said, not in my experience, but I bet your servers have a long more
RAM than my old Oracle server.

> 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? .

Gawd no, RAID 0 is good for playing with or for swap/temp drives. The only
thing faster and as safe as RAID 5 is hw mirroring, but you need more disks
for mirroring.

> 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).

I've used it at home on occasion and got some pretty good numbers out of
it. My current main PC at home has a HW RAID 0/1 controller and I had it
RAID 0 for awhile, but switched it back because both WinXP and Linux had a
problem installing with my controller, and now just depend on more RAM for
the speed.

- Bob Comer


"Geo."  wrote in message
news:3ebd516e$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> "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.
>
>

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