Below are some numbers on performance that correspond to the more normal "musician" usage of RAID, which would be raid-1 to protect against data-loss due to disk failure. Other levels of RAID end up being pretty unworkable, esp in a situation where you're using removable Raid-pairs in media-bays to store your media. And what's the point of doing Raid-5 (and wasting all that disk space and hardware controllers) in a situation where the disk isn't permanently mounted and needing to be online 24/7 -- aka a "server".<div>
<br></div><div>So it's important to characterize what you're trying to do before jumping to wild conclusions about what is "stupid." Stupid for a server room might be smart for a home recording setup. And far too often, i've watched supposedly professional sysadmins screw up their fancy RAID setups and lose everybody's data (they also forgot to check that the backups were actually valid) -- something that probably woulnd't have happened nearly as often if they'd have just gotten a single SATA disk and hooked it up without RAID, perhaps even on a standard "consumer" computer instead of their special overpriced "server" equipment (don't even start me on when <large-comp-co-killed-by-linux-and-now-acquired> would force their open source projects to use their crap "server" equipment that performed worse and were less reliable than some snot-nose gamer kid's rig.)<br>
<div><div><br></div><div>Anyways, enough talk, some numbers: </div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Performance#Performance_of_raids_with_2_disks">https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Performance#Performance_of_raids_with_2_disks</a></div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex; ">
RAID type sequential read random read sequential write random write</blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex; ">
Ordinary disk 82 34 67 56</blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex; ">
RAID0 155 80 97 80</blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex; ">
RAID1 80 35 72 55</blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex; ">
RAID10,n2 79 56 69 48</blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex; ">
RAID10,f2 150 79 70 55</blockquote><div><br></div><div>You'll note that RAID-1 performs about the same as an ordinary disk. In some cases of reading, RAID-1 can perform better than ordinary disks.</div><div><br></div>
<div>The other question to ponder, in this day and age of fast processors..... how much are you actually getting out of your expenditure for a hardware RAID controller. For example, the Areca 1280 was mentioned earlier ( <a href="http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=Areca+1280&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=17994260225728143364&ei=y5rhS7avOJfONMfp2ZkD">http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=Areca+1280&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=17994260225728143364&ei=y5rhS7avOJfONMfp2ZkD</a> ) -- $1,169 new!! For that price you could buy a whole other computer and let its general purpose CPU's and LSW do all the RAID computations -- aka a disk server. For that matter, why not just get a new 6-core processor ( <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3674/amds-sixcore-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-1055t-reviewed">http://www.anandtech.com/show/3674/amds-sixcore-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-1055t-reviewed</a> ) instead of a 4-core (or a 3 or 4 core instead of a 2 core) and when the additional cores are done doing your RAID computations, you'll be able to use them for more important and tangible things -- audio and graphics.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Isn't that a better use of potentially limited cash and space resources?</div><div><br></div>Niels</div><div><div><a href="http://nielsmayer.com">http://nielsmayer.com</a><br></div></div></div>