The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Hardware vs software raid

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by Koshinn, Aug 6, 2010.

  1. Koshinn

    Koshinn Notebook Deity

    Reputations:
    171
    Messages:
    1,146
    Likes Received:
    11
    Trophy Points:
    56
    What's the current state of raid technology? With a quad core cpu is software raid just as good?
     
    Koshinn, Aug 6, 2010
    #1
  2. mcfaddenator

    mcfaddenator Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    3
    Messages:
    172
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    From what I've heard, most software RAID setups aren't built efficiently yet, and can't effectively take advantage of a multicore system. So my answer is that it's still not as fast.
     
    mcfaddenator, Aug 6, 2010
    #2
  3. newsposter

    newsposter Notebook Virtuoso

    Reputations:
    801
    Messages:
    3,881
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    105
    All raid is software raid. All of it. The cheap XOR engines on low-cost raid controllers aren't really any faster than a raid driver running at the OS level.

    The *real* difference is how the raid controller behaves during failure mode and loss of power.

    If your raid controller doesn't have an independent battery and recover-from-power-loss routines BUILT-IN, it is running with the same risks as a raid driver running as a part of the OS and main CPU.

    This is why good, trusted raid controllers cost $500 and up and cheap raid controllers don't seem to run any faster than an os/cpu level raid driver.

    Buying or configuring raid based on how things behave when all is well is stupid. You need to consider (and TEST!!) how things behave and recover from failure. That is where raid proves it's worth.
     
    newsposter, Aug 6, 2010
    #3
  4. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

    Reputations:
    2,354
    Messages:
    4,449
    Likes Received:
    476
    Trophy Points:
    151
    I think that Koshinn's question is whether OS-based RAID is better than motherboard-based RAID or RAID based off of a dedicated RAID controller.

    To provide a short answer to (what I assume to be) the question, stay away from software-based RAID. If you are using RAID-0, then it requires your OS to be intact in order to use the RAID array.

    If you are asking from a pure performance perspective, then it is all equivalent. But choosing one method of implenting RAID over another is never about performance - as newsposter correctly stated, it is always about how the RAID controller handles failure mode. With OS-based RAID, you have a much higher rate of data loss, because you need to worry about failures in your RAID array, as well as failures in your OS and OS partition.
     
    kent1146, Aug 7, 2010
    #4