[rescue] Filesystem choice for fileserver?

[Dan Sikorski]

Phil Stracchino wrote:
>>
>> A lot of hardware RAID cards have horribly slow processors on them.
>
> Oops ...  premature sendage.
>
> What I meant to say was that the big win of *good* hardware RAID is 
> that, as long as the manufacturer did the job properly, the host OS 
> doesn't have to be up for you to rebuild or reconfigure the array (or 
> to configure it in the first place).
>
>

I've found that good hardware RAID also has good processors and is not 
slow.  I much prefer having the RAID processing done by a dedicated 
processor, there are plenty of other things for the CPU to do.  Also, 
you have less data being transferred over the host bus, which can easily 
be the bottleneck when you're talking about pc based systems with 32bit 
PCI.  This was a strong consideration of mine when i built my fileserver 
with a PCI-X 3ware 9500.  In  my testing, RAID 5 was faster than RAID 10 
on the 3ware.  Clearly my bottleneck is disk speed, not controller or 
host bus speed.

    -Dan Sikorski