If you really must run raid 5 on a windows machine that doesnt perform like shit you have two choices. Windows raid vs intel rst vs raid z vs hardware raid. Intel raid on your motherboard, is something people in the linux world refer to as fake raid and what is does is that a raid bios on your motherboard handles raid commands using the cpu to issue those commands rather then a dedicated raid controller, so under heavy readwrite situations, disk io will use more cpu resources than a real. Raid stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. Heavy processing can cause some pieces of data to be delayed by a small amount of time.
For hardware raid, that cpu can be in a disk array or in a raid controller. Why the best raid configuration is no raid configuration. Ive actually had up to 3 hd movies streaming off the array simultaneously with no issues and not even putting a dent in what the setup can do. What is the difference between a software and hardware raid. Raid redundant array of independent disks is one of the popular data storage virtualization technology.
Oct 30, 2015 now, lets see how windows raid0 stacks up to actual hardware raid. Having cache with bbu will speed up most of you things a lot. 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. 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. Software raid vs fake raid on intel rste server fault. 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. Raid 1 vs backup and software raid 1 vs hardware raid 1 h. Theres a bit more cpu overhead there, but not enough in most cases to warrant a hardware based system. What is the performance implication of hardware vs. As hivizman noted, if you require an enterprise level of reliability and resource allocation, then it is best served to go with a discrete hardware based platform.
As the comments on my recent post apples new kickbutt file system showed, some folks cant believe that software raid could be. Am i better off using the bios raid functionality of the card or just having it as a sata controller and using linux software raid. By definition, fake raid has no inherent benefits over honest software raid, they share all hardware and the os people have better watch over the implementations. I would generally agree with a preference for hardware vs. Users generally refer to fakeraid when referring to products such as the intel ich10r, amd sb850, and various marvell products as another example where raid mirroring, striping, and parity calculations occur through software powered by the host systems cpu. But the real question is whether you should use a hardware raid solution or a software raid solution. Intel says it augmented mdraid to support metadata from rste. Or, go on ebay and look for old hardware raid controllers. Note, these are my terms because i cant remember the proper ones. Here are some tips on raid levels and some feedback on the software vs. I ran the benchmarks using various chunk sizes to see if that had an effect on either hardware or software configurations for the. Whilst the new code handling the raid io still runs in the kernel, devicemapper is generally. 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. As far as fault tolerance goes, ill respectfully disagree.
Now, lets see how windows raid0 stacks up to actual hardware raid. I have an adaptec 1220sa 2 port sata raid controller and 2 seagate drives which im going to use in my home server in raid 1. Hardware raid presents logical disks that are already configured to the system or the san, mirrored and ready to go. Dedicated hardware controller doing the processing vs.
Under software raid, that configuration is performed in the. Raid redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both. The decision between a discrete hardware based solution versus a software based solution boils down to how robust of a raid platform you are wanting to set up. 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. Oct 25, 20 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. Hardware redundant array of inexpensive disks raid and software raid are two main ways for setting up raid system. Any cacheless onboard raid controller is a near useless fake raid, made gluing together a satasas controller and said opaque driver. This was in contrast to the previous concept of highly reliable mainframe disk drives. Jul 07, 2009 a redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability. Software raid virtually belongs to operating system. I have a zfs raid 10 software raid as my primary storage setup and the read speeds i get are more than enough to saturate my gigabit ethernet. The highpoint 2700 has a marvell 9445 raid processor on board. Configuration is still required, but that configuration takes place outside the system. It is fakeraid, but a class above the other fakes and much faster than any built in parity raid in windows.
Whether software raid vs hardware raid is the one for you depends on what you need to do and how much you want to pay. That is to say, it is hardware independent without needs to be tied to hardware vendors. Intel suggests mdraid which is software raid utility. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a special raid controller inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. Fakeraid the hardwaresoftware solution users generally refer to fakeraid when referring to products such as the intel ich10r, amd sb850, and various marvell products as another example where raid mirroring, striping, and parity calculations occur through software powered by the host systems cpu. The biggest positive for hardware raid is the os is presented the array as one disk. This allows the raid adapter to deal with bad sectors and the best way to write data and read data. Software hardware raid 1 as previously mentioned doesnt matter. 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. Intel does not like dmraid which is a fake raid utility. A software raid can be prone to data corruption, due to the fault of the raid software or driver that is being used. A hardware raid controller would be best, but the fakemotherboardneedsadriver raid is just one more thing to go wrong, and the less likely you will be able to get the array back if the mobo fails. Stay away from ich10r type raid solutions fake raid. I have an adaptec 1220sa 2 port sata raid controller and 2 seagate drives which im going to use in my home server in raid1.
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 1990s also saw the introduction of raidframe mdraid came along in 2001. Hardware raid is a lot like the big brother of fake raid, nothing is worse besides the price and a few things are better, but still lacks a number of features that software raid has. 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. Intel raid on your motherboard, is something people in the linux world refer to as fake raid and what is does is that a raid bios on your motherboard handles raid commands using the cpu to issue those commands rather then a dedicated raid controller, so under heavy readwrite situations, disk io will use more cpu.
Dec 21, 2005 for hardware raid, that cpu can be in a disk array or in a raid controller. Your software raid array can and will steal substantial amounts of your cpus. Hardware raid cards introduce an additional device within the system, that singularly may fail itself, but by introducing this additional card it is able to offload the parity calculations from maintaining the raid off of the cpu. Hardware raid vs os raid solutions experts exchange. 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. Software raid is a type of raid implementation that utilizes operating systembased capabilities to construct and deliver raid services. Fakeraid as you call it isnt some immoral thing that the customer needs to be aware of and shy. As for the hardware vs software raid question, adaptec raid cards are good at what they do. If you have hardware raid then youll most probably have a hardware controller with hardware cache on it. Theres a lot of personal preference when choosing software vs. Jul 06, 2011 reasons for using software raid versus a hardware raid setup. Difference between hardware raid and software raid. Jul 15, 2008 hardware beats out software substantially in output for parity raid, with hardware being 66% faster for block output and 20% faster for rewrite performance in a 256kb chunk raid 6. Fake raid is called such because it simulates a hardware raid controller from bios initialization all the way to normal os operation, but this is done only through a combination of two software parts.
Side by side, intel % change vs software raid 0 intel performance increase over microsoft. 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. 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. In testing both software and hardware raid performance i employed six 750gb samsung sata drives in three raid configurations 5, 6, and 10. Reasons for using software raid versus a hardware raid setup.
If that controller has a bbu battery that retains the contents of the cache on power loss then the performance difference will be huge. When changing mother boardcpu can a raid card, hardware raidsoftware raidfakeraid be implemented into the new machine without data loss using raid 5 or 10. Hardware fakeraid vs linux software raid anandtech forums. Software vs bios vs hardware raid ars technica openforum. They can form any number of conclusions based on either slight shreds of evidence, text theyve glanced over, crap theyve heard from other uninformed people, etc. Most onboard chipset based software soltuions can hande those with little issue.
A hp server that i work on had two disks in a raid 1 array, one of my colleagues added an extra disk and made it a raid 5, the hardware raid device moved the data around as appropriate while the machine was running and the disk space was expanded without any downtime. Additionally, hardware assisted 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 megaraid software bios lets you setup the hardware raid before the os boots and handles the controller thats most likely on the mobo hence it finding it on the pci bus. Feb 28, 2018 raid redundant array of independent disks is one of the popular data storage virtualization technology.
Raid 1 vs backup and software raid 1 vs hardware raid 1. Hardware raid will cost more, but it will also be free of software raid s. Unlike hardware raid, fake raid does not present the array as a single logical disk to the os, so the os still needs to explicitly support fake raid. There are two parts to the software raid fakeraid equation. Well, maybe this will help, as i cant give you any guarantees about any combination of hardware. Some software raid implementations include a piece of hardware, which might make the implementation seem like a. 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. Hardware raid offers better reliability compared to software raid. A redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability. Raid 1e requires min of 3 disk, and raid 10 requires a min of 4 disk.
Two disks, sata 3, hardware raid 0 hardware raid 0. The highpoint 2700 series are extremely low end to be sure but fake raid isnt about low or high end, it is about intentionally faking being hardware when really being software raid. In other raid configs it also allows for the array to be rebuilt with less of a performance hit on the os. Research before you make that change, as windows wont be bootable afterwards there are ways around it with certain oss per my colleague but i have not seen it.
Software raid works relying on the operating system. Another limitation of linux software raid is expanding raid groups. The main difference between biosfakehardware and windows software raid, as far as i know, would be. What happens to fake raidhardware raidsoftware raids with a kernel upgrade. Hardware raid and implications for the future duration. But with budget favoring the software raid, those wanting optimum performance and efficiency of raid will have to go with the hardware raid. As the software for monitoring is standardized, you can use the same ways to monitor the health and performance of all your servers. Fake raid is nothing more than a software raid done via a proprietary binary driverblob. This is a method of improving the performance and reliability of your storage media by using multiple drives. Softwarehardware raid 1 as previously mentioned doesnt matter.
Jun, 2016 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. Ive been hoping other people would post with some experience, because im in the middle of a decision and am leaning toward software but. If anything they should be advised to increase ram and be done with it. That is what the thread was about, mainly, will raid 1 benefit enough to justify the extra risk and investment for a hw controller. It combines multiple inexpensive, small disk drives into an array of disks in order to provide redundancy, lower latency maximizing the chanc. Then you need to identify what you feel is more likely to fail. A hardware raid controller would be best, but the fake motherboardneedsadriver raid is just one more thing to go wrong, and the less likely you will be able to get the array back if the mobo fails.
Raid 5 with hot spare disks, raid 1 or 10 should be more tolerant. Windows software raid vs hardware raid ars technica. To put those sidebyside, heres the difference you can expect when comparing hardware raid0 to software raid0. If you want to set the controller to ahci, be aware it will affect your windows install. Imho, im a big fan of kernel developers non directly related to zfs, so i really prefere mdadm to hardware raid. Differences between hardware raid, hbas, and software raid. Regarding raid1e and 10 the main difference between 1e and 10 is that 1e uses an odd number of disk for providing protection, where as 10 uses an even number of disk.
Scott lowe responds to a techrepublic discussion and one members raid dilemma. I generally prefer hardware raid to software raid, but i find a raid controller is worth the money when youre dealing with servers. 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. It is used to improve disk io performance and reliability of your server or workstation. Benefits and drawbacks of hybrid, hardware assisted software raid.
A software raid can also be affected if the host computer is heavily loaded. As the comments on my recent post apples new kickbutt file system showed, some folks cant believe that software raid could be faster than a modern hardware raid system. This is hardware raid and, honestly, im guessing it is slower than software raid if really tested, it lack the horsepower to anything much. A raid can be deployed using both software and hardware. Windows raid vs intel rst vs raidz vs hardware raid. Software raid a simple way to describe software raid is that the raid task runs on the cpu of your computer system.
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