[Ardour-Users] SATA RAID - hardware or software?

Arnold Krille arnold at arnoldarts.de
Fri Feb 20 01:44:21 PST 2009


On Friday 20 February 2009 03:50:20 Justin M. Streiner wrote:
> That said, I plan to build the system with two separate RAID sets - a
> RAID 1 set for the system, and a RAID 10 set for Ardour sessions.  I
> suspect that I can run the system RAID 1 set using the software RAID
> drivers in Linux, but what I don't know is if that driver would impose a
> significant enough performance penalty for the audio RAID 10 set to make a
> hardware SATA RAID controller a necessity.  Has anyone on the list had any
> experience with this?

I can't really speek about the different performances. I know that for me 
software raid is fast enough.
And I know that with hardware raid you better buy two controllers so you can 
access the data when the first controller dies. With software raid you just 
plug the drives in a different mobo...

BTW: Maybe you should look into lvm instead of the second raid10. I think you 
can achieve the same (mirror and stripping) but get more advantages like 
growing the partitions when more disks arrive.

And maybe you don't need the mirroring for the data-disks at all, maybe its 
better to have one disk only for the (nightly) backups of the data.
Or you can skip the native stripping of raid and "just" use ardours raid-
feature with two directories on two different disks. That could be even more of 
an advantage as this allows the disks to pre-read the real audio data needed, 
instead of the os requesting the read-ahead of the audio-data from the disks 
but there that data is on different physical disks...

Have fun,

Arnold
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