A single drive provides a read speed of 85 mbs and a write speed of 88 mbs. So it looks like hardware raid 10 is the winner for windows setup providing you can replace the card in event of failure, and software raid 10 is a viable option for linux etc. Lastly, the postgresql results were competitive for the most part except during raid1 where the mdadm configured raid arrays were much slower. If you are familiar with raid, you may skip to the 2nd page of this article. Raid redundant array of independent disks is one of the popular data storage virtualization technology. A raid can be deployed using both software and hardware. It is still software but running on a dedicated controller. All drives are attached to the highpoint controller.
Comparing hardware raid vs software raid deals with how the. Now, lets see how windows raid0 stacks up to actual hardware raid. Imho, im a big fan of kernel developers non directly related to zfs, so i really prefere mdadm to hardware raid. Raid stands for redundant array of independent disks. Or raid 1 if you only need the speedcapacity of a single pair. Since you mention server most likely there is hardware raid present. Linux disks utility benchmark is used so we can see the performance graph. 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. Please no comments on changing oses andor hardware. By contrast, on a core i7 using linux software raid. For raid5 linux was 30 % faster 440 mbs vs 340 mbs for reads. Raid1, raid5, raid6, or raid10 is the stuff you should. Software raid 6 vs hardware all i can find is vague, conflicting comments with nothing to back them up.
It is a way to virtualize multiple, independent hard disk drives into one or more arrays to improve performance, capacity and reliability. With software raid your data can be split across different enclosures for complete redundancy one can completely stop working and your data is still ok. After many years of running software raid setups in linux ive never run into a bug that caused data loss. In most cases, mainstream users are able to configure raid 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays using their motherboards builtin sata ports and a little bit of software, yielding reasonable performance. Raid stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. You can easily move disks from a failed enclosure to a new one, and all your data is preserved.
Difference between hardware raid and software raid. I have a raid controller that only supports mirrored and stripped raid sets, id like to run my hyperv virtual machines and store the. Running raid or not makes no difference to the chipset. Jul 06, 2011 reasons for using software raid versus a hardware raid setup. Software raid virtually belongs to operating system. Boosts system performance for backups and restoration, especially in. By red squirrel raid intro before we start, lets first start by a quick introduction to what raid is, and why you should use it. There is great software raid support in linux these days. Those tests were done using the btrfs builtin raid capabilities while today are some comparison tests against those numbers when using the linux software raid setup via mdadm. I am wondering if anyone has done any benchmarks or tests regarding the performance difference of 2 ssd raid1 on software raid vs hardware raid. Two disks, sata 3, hardware raid 0 hardware raid 0. Plug them in and they behave like a big and fast disk. Bsd opensolaris and linux raid software drivers are open source.
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. We list the pros and cons of hardware vs software raid to help you decide. I still prefer having raid done by some hw component that operates independently of the os. Dedicated hardware controller doing the processing vs. 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. Jul 15, 2008 by ben martin in testing both software and hardware raid performance i employed six 750gb samsung sata drives in three raid configurations 5, 6, and 10. Feb 28, 2018 raid redundant array of independent disks is one of the popular data storage virtualization technology. The promise controller is pretty fast with its iop333 cpu in linux, from the benchmarks ive seen. 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. May 23, 2010 all drives are attached to the highpoint controller. Windows raid vs intel rst vs raid z vs hardware raid. Jul 07, 2009 a redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability. But it is worth pointing out, that even topoftherange hardware raid cards max out at about 800 mbs write in raid 6. The controller is not used for raid, only to supply sufficient sata ports.
Favoring hardware raid over software raid comes from a time when. 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. The hw raid was a quite expensive usd 800 adaptec sas31205 pci express 12sataport pcie x8 hardware raid card. Windows raid vs intel rst vs raidz vs hardware raid. Want to get an idea of what speed advantage adding an expensive hardware raid card to your new server is likely to give you. In testing both software and hardware raid performance i employed six 750gb samsung sata drives in three raid configurations 5, 6, and 10. A redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability.
Microsoft storage spaces is hot garbage for parity storage. Oct 30, 2015 now, lets see how windows raid0 stacks up to actual hardware raid. This table summarizes the key differences between hardware and software raids. 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. Hardware raid controllers appear in this list, but fakeraid implementations do not. Theyre expensive, the software to manage them tends to be really awful, and it make portability of drives a problem. 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. You could also go with hardware raid card in raid 0, and accept the risks for a 33% performance gain at a risk factor of 4. Theres nothing inherently wrong with cpuassisted aka software raid, but you should use the software raid that. The terms hardware raid and software raid are very misleading as all raid controllers do raid using software. So 4 300 gb sas 15,000 rpm drives in a raid 5 array, will give you 900gb of space and blazing fast disk access. Side by side, intel % change vs software raid 0 intel performance increase over microsoft. How to use mdadm linux raid a highly resilient raid solution.
Motherboard raid, also known as fake raid, is almost always merely biosassisted software raid, implemented in firmware and is closedsource, proprietary, nonstandard, and often buggy, and almost always slower than the timetested and reliable software raid found in linux. Soft possibly the longest running battle in raid circles is which is faster, hardware raid or software raid. With cheaper hardware raid you can also lose data if theres a power outage. It is used to improve disk io performance and reliability of your server or workstation. May 24, 2005 scott lowe responds to a techrepublic discussion and one members raid dilemma. Hardware raid will cost more, but it will also be free of software raids. Linux software raid listed raid6 as beta is that still the case. 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. 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.
It combines multiple inexpensive, small disk drives into an array of disks in order to provide redundancy, lower latency maximizing the chanc. But the real question is whether you should use a hardware raid solution or a software raid solution. Linux software raid mdadm testing is a continuation of the earlier standalone benchmarks. Flexibility is the key advantage of an open source software raid, like linux mdadm.
But to appease the powers that be, i have explained the two below hardware raid is when you have a dedicated controller to do the work for you. To put those sidebyside, heres the difference you can expect when comparing hardware raid0 to software raid0. Solved using both hardware and software raid together. Plus, software raid permits users to reconfigure your arrays without being restricted by the hardware raid controller. Maybe with linux software raid and xfs you would see more benifit. In my case the setup will be used for a website doing heavy io readwriteimages with a big db.
But with budget favoring the software raid, those wanting optimum performance and efficiency of raid will have to go with the hardware raid. Software raid is a type of raid implementation that utilizes operating systembased capabilities to construct and deliver raid services. Rather than software vs hardware raid, the different behaviors are due to the presence or absence of a powerloss protected cache. These results today were rather mixed, but keep in mind this was just looking at the outofthebox performance for each of these linux raid implementations across four consumer grade. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a special raid controller inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. What is the difference between a software and hardware raid. You can benchmark the performance difference between running a raid using the linux kernel software raid and a hardware raid card. With software raid, i can pull drives out of one system and put them into another, and voila, the volume is there. Software vs bios vs hardware raid ars technica openforum.
How to setup software raid for a simple file server on ubuntu. Difference between software and hardware raid 10 if the. Hardware redundant array of inexpensive disks raid and software raid are two main ways for setting up raid system. For raid 5 or 6, parity calculations are still done on the cpu in this configuration. We recommend linux software raid, optionally, with lvm. Certainly with raid 6, hardware raid processors can start to become a bottleneck by the time you get to 812 drives. I have been using raid in linux for many years using mdadm, which is available for. Software vs hardware raid nixcraft nixcraft linux tips. This is a method of improving the performance and reliability of your storage media by using multiple drives. Here are some tips on raid levels and some feedback on the software vs. Hardware raid will cost more, but it will also be free of software raid s. On the software side, todays software raid is superfast at least with linux and. The only way that fake raid stresses the chipset is from the io, nothing more, nothing less. 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.
Windows software raid vs hardware raid ars technica. But with budget favoring the software raid, those wanting optimum performance and. Better performance, especially in more complex raid configurations. Scott lowe responds to a techrepublic discussion and one members raid dilemma. Raid controllers also come in the form of cards that act like a scsi controller to the operating system but handle all of the actual drive communications themselves. My own tests of the two alternatives yielded some interesting results. While a file server setup to use software raid would likely sport a quad core cpu with 8 or 16gb of ram, the relative differences in performance. The hardware raid card apple sells will run sas drives, which are much faster 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 just basically fear the unknown. Fake raid is like a software raid that you can boot directly off of, but thats about it. I originally thought to do software raid 5 with 4 disks, but i read software raid has serious performance issues when it has to calculate write parity so it dawned on me. Therefore both are susceptible to bugs in software. The linux kernel contains an md driver that allows the raid solution to be completely hardware independent. Also, true hardware raid controller are often rather expensive, so if someone customized the system, then it is very likely that choosing a hardware raid setup made a very noticeable change in the computers price.
Software raid6 vs hardware all i can find is vague, conflicting comments with nothing to back them up. Hardware and software raid are two different worlds. Regarding linux software raid, i have gentoo linux em64t latest version compiled with cflags of marchcorei7avx mtunecorei7avx and after a complete recompile tuned for this platform, including the gcc4. Obviously, this isnt going to happen in a home server. I ran the benchmarks using various chunk sizes to see if that had an effect on either hardware or. The difference is not big between the expensive hw raid controller and linux sw raid. Windows software raid vs hardware raid 10 posts arlesterc. 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. In these cases, you plug the drives into the raid controller just like you would a scsi controller, but then you add them to the raid controllers configuration, and the operating system never knows the difference. The toms hardware guide toms goes raid5 is an oldie but a goody exhaustive article about the subject, which i personally use as reference, however take the benchmarks with a grain of salt as it is talking about windows implementation of software raid as with everything else, im sure linux. Software vs hardware raid performance and cache usage server. The comparison of these two competing linux raid offerings were done with two ssds of raid0 and raid1 and then four ssds using raid0, raid1, and raid10 levels.