Software RAID 5 or something else?

[Gordon Messmer]

aragonx at dcsnow.com wrote:
> 
> My original idea was to put them in a RAID 5 configuration.  This sounded
> good until I started researching RAID controller cards.  It looks like it
> will cost me $520 to get a good PCI-E card (3Ware 8 port).  I don't think
> I want to spend that much if I don't have to.
> 
> My goals are two fold.
> 
> 1) I want to get some redundancy in case of a drive failure.
> 
> 2) I want to increase my performance.

If you want to increase performance relative to a single drive, RAID 5 
is the wrong choice.  Many (most, in my experience) workloads will run 
slower on RAID 5.  I recommend running RAID 10 if you think the storage 
needs to be faster.  Either get sixth drive for 2.25TB of storage, or 
set up a 1.5TB array with a hot spare.

Software RAID is fine if you don't want to pay for a controller, but get 
yourself a UPS.

> I have benchmarked my read and
> write performance to and from this server.  Using Samba, I seem to be able
> to get about 50Mb/sec reads and 40Mb/sec writes.  I am on a gig network
> and would like to be able to max out the cards (90Mb/sec is what I get at
> work).

More than likely, you need to enable jumbo frames on all of your systems.