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Living Room / Re: nudone's new pc
« Last post by Rover on December 21, 2005, 07:51 PM »Short RAID lesson for PC's. There are two types these days... Hardware & Software.
Hardware RAID is the old tired and true, better performance RAID we know and love from SCSI Systems. They use coprocessors on the RAID controller to offload some of the lower level drive operations from the CPU.
A few years ago, the Linux folks (Note: Someone else may have started this, I first saw it on Linux) started futzing with software RAID. The concept was simple, use a kernel lever drive to emulate Hardware RAID.
There are several inexpensive SATA RAID controllers available today. Many of them on the mobo. I would not be surprised to find that a software based RAID configuration did not improve performance by much. It will tax the CPU and general be more work to get the data off than a true hardware solution.
Disk access is usually the bottleneck for overall processing speed. It's why we still have mainframes in use today. They kick ass at moving data around on DASD. Offloading some of the disk processes to a RAID controller and adding more spindles to the mix should generally improve performance on any system. It may not be enough of an improvement to justify the cost, and hassle though...
As always, your mileage may vary.
Hardware RAID is the old tired and true, better performance RAID we know and love from SCSI Systems. They use coprocessors on the RAID controller to offload some of the lower level drive operations from the CPU.
A few years ago, the Linux folks (Note: Someone else may have started this, I first saw it on Linux) started futzing with software RAID. The concept was simple, use a kernel lever drive to emulate Hardware RAID.
There are several inexpensive SATA RAID controllers available today. Many of them on the mobo. I would not be surprised to find that a software based RAID configuration did not improve performance by much. It will tax the CPU and general be more work to get the data off than a true hardware solution.
Disk access is usually the bottleneck for overall processing speed. It's why we still have mainframes in use today. They kick ass at moving data around on DASD. Offloading some of the disk processes to a RAID controller and adding more spindles to the mix should generally improve performance on any system. It may not be enough of an improvement to justify the cost, and hassle though...
As always, your mileage may vary.
up to create OS/2. When the broke up 
in the early 90's both had rights to the kernel. Up until Win2K, you could still see references to OS/2 in the environment variables. 
