I'm planning to rebuild our lab, and I would have some advise from you.
The new lab at start will have 4 linux PC with 4 disk (1TB each one) in RAID5.
- First question, raid hardware or software? (I read an article and the performance seem similar, and with a raid software I can had disk without losing data
- Should be very beautiful to have a distribuited file system, but I can't find performance benchmark… anyone is using OpenAFS and can tell me if the performance are bad or not?
Thank you in advance.
inode
In my opinion
Never, never use RAID 5 software, if you can't boot, then the software can't run, then you can't rebuild … So it's basically useless in that respect.
Az.
I would strongly agree with azreal on the choice of hardware RAID.
Another consideration is your choice of RAID 5. For disk intensive operations such as database access (or forensics) RAID 5 is not the best choice due to the constant parity calculations, I would recommend RAID 10. (a quick Google of RAID 5 vs. RAID 10 will provide a plethora of other reasons). Also the physical controller will make a significant difference in performance.