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. What is the difference between a software and hardware raid. It is a way to virtualize multiple, independent hard disk drives into one or more arrays to improve performance, capacity and reliability. Why the best raid configuration is no raid configuration. Enduser devices get the latest strategies to help deploy and manage the computers, tablets, and other devices your employees use every day data center create a secure, available, and highperformance data center whether on site or in the cloud storage maintain, manage, and protect your organizations data with the latest equipment and best practices. Imho, im a big fan of kernel developers non directly related to zfs, so i really prefere mdadm to hardware raid. Hi, about hardware vs software raid, i use software raid since 8 years but now that i start to use kvm to virtualize all my servers i read a lot about software vs hardware raid and i can said that the only cons in software raid is that the news hds have much more cache mem thats the old ones so a lot of info is stored in cache previus to record in the harddisk, so if you have a problem with. Software raid has advanced significantly in the last few years as of 2012. Raid redundant array of independent disks is one of the popular data storage virtualization technology. 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. So could i do a software raid 5 of 18 tb total 3x 6 tb.
Today im running linux md raid10 with 4 x hitachi 4tb nas drives. As for the hardware vs software raid question, adaptec raid cards are good at what they do. The hardware is typically expensive, and adds a substantial amount to the cost of the whole system. As one member pointed out, software raid is like playing with fire. On the flip side, the cheap software raid can impair the host computer. To understand hardware raid arrays, you need to know about how a raid stores its data on each drive. Second, if your raid card fails, your raid volume fails.
Hardware raid presents logical disks that are already configured to the system or the san, mirrored and ready to go. Hardware redundant array of inexpensive disks raid and software raid are two main ways for setting up raid system. Raid stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. Do i let the card configure raid 6 or use linux raid. My purpose using veritas volume manager is to ease of increase the disk size when it required. 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. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a special raid controller inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. I will then be able to get 18tb of available space. Im about to start a new server build for home media storage. Ive ordered an areca 1280ml 24 port sata controller. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as raid levels.
The question of software vs hardware raid in a device like this is an oversimplification. Real raids for speed and were needed but for movies and home storage software is the best bang for buck imo only. If you have a server hiccup, you could have some data loss issues. I dont care much about io rate, and care more about transfer. 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. Now, lets see how windows raid0 stacks up to actual hardware raid. Software raid is almost always a better choice than hardware raid. I personally avoid marvell integrated raid like the plague due to extremely poor performance worse by far than windows raid, but some of their actual hardware solutions are alright. What is a hardware raid protect your data with a raid. In this video from the lustre user group 20, alan poston from xyratex presents.
Soft possibly the longest running battle in raid circles is which is faster, hardware raid or software raid. Reading software vs hardware raid performance and cache usage confuses me. A raid can be deployed using both software and hardware. But the real question is whether you should use a hardware raid solution or a software raid solution. But with budget favoring the software raid, those wanting optimum performance and. Software raid is a type of raid implementation that utilizes operating systembased capabilities to construct and deliver raid services. Raid 1e requires min of 3 disk, and raid 10 requires a min of 4 disk. Hardware raid 5e vs 6 vs 10 for home media server hard.
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. To put those sidebyside, heres the difference you can expect when comparing hardware raid0 to software raid0. Reasons for using software raid versus a hardware raid setup. Windows software raid vs hardware raid 10 posts arlesterc. 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. Under software raid, that configuration is performed in the. First off, thank you all for your comments whether they were directly for my original questions or a pointer for software vs hardware raid. Hardware raid vs software raid windows 7 help forums. 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. If your expected io rate is high, then hardware raid can offer better performance as the raid is offloaded to dedicated hardware. Thus if the os fails the raid is gone and so is the data, whereas on a hardware level regardless of os the data remains.
Configuration is still required, but that configuration takes place outside the system. 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. 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. Dedicated hardware controller doing the processing vs. This is for large photoshop and tiff images, ranging from 250mb to as much as 1. It is used to improve disk io performance and reliability of your server or workstation. Raid will protect you against hardware failure, but you should still be using backup software to protect you aginst file corruption, file deletion and virusransomware hardware raid array. My experience with hardware and fake hardware 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.
This is a method of improving the performance and reliability of your storage media by using multiple drives. I have always used hardware based raid because it imho is on the right level feel free to dispute this, and because os failures are more common to me than hardware issues. I have scoured through articles written about tuning software and i have used linux software raid for over 10 years. Hardware raid and implications for the future duration.
As i only have 8tb avaiable space, im planning for the future and raid6 based on 5x 6tb disks seems good to me space wise. Obviously, hardware raid is pricier compared to software raid, due to the extra hardware that you need to purchase. 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. Now from my understanding hardware raid is anything done with a raid. Difference between hardware raid and software raid. Another limitation of linux software raid is expanding raid groups. A redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability. Raid hardware vs raid software what is your best option. In order to better monitor the health and performance of your raid system, you have to rely on the specific software, which can be only provided by the vendor. Windows raid vs intel rst vs raidz vs hardware raid. 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, as you might already know, is usually builtin on your os and unlike a hardware raid, you will need to spend a little extra on a controller card. The reason i sought a hardware raid solution was due to the fact that for about 8 months i was running mdadm as a software raid 6 solution. The main difference between biosfakehardware and windows software raid, as far as i know, would be. Side by side, intel % change vs software raid 0 intel performance increase over microsoft. 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. 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. 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. Hardware raid is far more expensive than software raid. It combines multiple inexpensive, small disk drives into an array of disks in order to provide redundancy, lower latency maximizing the chanc. In testing both software and hardware raid performance i employed six 750gb samsung sata drives in three raid configurations 5, 6, and 10. Plan to use software raid veritas volume mgr on c1t2d0 disk. Software raid 5 vs hardware raid 5 anandtech forums. For instance, the highend disk controllers can be very costly.
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