RAID (was: RE: [geeks] New Itanium machines from SGI)

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 10:44:16PM -0800, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> Hmm, I actually think that Software RAID on Linux kicks some serious
> ass.  The only other implementation that I've used heavily is on NT, and
> that one blows goats.  Anyway, the Linux software RAID implementation is
> faster than Dave chasing a pretty girl.  It easily outstripes any and
> all of the PCI based RAID solutions that I've been able to get people to
> run benchmarks on.  Using RAID 5 on modern CPUs uses code tuned to fit
> into L1 cache, making the checksumming FAR faster than you can hope to
> deliver from disks.  RAID 1, 0, and 10 don't show up as being any faster
> or slower than the PCI based RAID cards (the differences are within the
> margin of error for my testing).  Booting from RAID 1 works and is
> pretty well tested.  Software RAID also offers you the flexibility of
> working with slices (err, partitions, whatever) instead of whole disks
> (I've never seen a hardware-based solution that worked this way).
> Anyway, I think software RAID is a clear winner for -small- RAID arrays,
> meaning no more than a couple dozen disks, and maybe a TB of moderately
> use.

Now, is this only for Linux/x86, or for Linux/anything modern supported,
like, say, SPARC64.

So, err, can anyone constrast this with the various sorts of software
raid on NetBSD, OpenBSD, and/or Solaris?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd