Re: 3ware - Itanium compatible drivers?

[Seth Mos <knuffie@xs4all.nl>]

At 11:27 30-1-2003 -0500, Greg Freemyer wrote:

>Or have any thoughts about a pure software Raid?

I like software raid, good value for the price. It's fast too.

>I know the md driver can do Raid 1, can it do Raid 5?

Yes, for the best performance you should at least use the version 2 
log(journal) with a md raid5 or even better, use a external logdevice.
A raid 1 system disk would be a good candidate. Note that putting the 
external logdevice on a different drive _can_ result in a performance 
bottleneck when you have more concurrent metadata throughput (not data!) 
then the external logdevice can shove.

My suggestion, put 2 15K rpm scsi disks in a raid 1 config (may be software 
raid) for the root and boot drive and put the external logdevice on here as 
well. Then use the rest of the disks for a software raid 5 container with 
about 4-5 disks per scsi channel (if you use scsi).

The faster logdevice disks can do a lot of IO per second which will help a 
busy filesystem.

If 3ware does deliver cards for IA64 the external log device issue is moot.

Cheers

--
Seth
It might just be your lucky day, if you only knew.