Re: [gentoo-user] Is an Intel motherboard RAID better or worse than software RAID?

[Paul Hartman]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 8:08 AM, Wolfgang Liebich
<wolfgang.liebich@×××××××.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm in the process of setting up a new private computer. I've bought one
> with two drives b/c I wanted to setup a RAID system - RAID1 for
> important partitions, RAID0 for scratch files maybe.
> Additionally I would like to use LVM2 --- on my work PC I've grown to
> like the flexibility of that.
> The Intel DQ35JO motherboard now supports some kind of mobo based RAID.
> Is it better to use this HW raid, or to ignore that and use only the
> linux kernel's software RAID.
> Additionally the LVM2 utilities seem to have limited mirroring/striping
> capabilities of their own - I only want to use RAID levels 0 and 1
> anyways -- would LVM's methods be better here?

Hi,

I've got 4 regular 500gb SATA drives in a linux software RAID5 (BIOS
fakeraid disabled), not using LVM, and with a AES dmcrypt on top of
it, and the performance is really good in my opinion. The encrypted
RAID has a faster read speed than a single, non-RAID, non-encrypted
SATA drive of the same model. Obviously with the encryption & parity
calculations the writes are not as fast, but it's still 25 megabytes
per second write speed which seems pretty good to me. I have a Core 2
E6600 (overclocked to 3ghz).

The time to rebuild the RAID after a system failure for this 4x500gb
is about 90 minutes.

Good luck,
Paul