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If your budget is tight, and you are using RAID 0 or RAID 1, there will be no big difference between software RAID and hardware RAID. Software RAID vs Hardware RAID: Which One Should You ChooseĬhoosing between software RAID and hardware RAID depends on what you need to do and cost. You have to firstly tell your system to stop using the disk and then replace the disk. Replacing failed disk in the software RAID is a bit more complex. Software RAID is often specific to the operating system being used, so it cannot generally be used for partitions that are shared between operating systems. Since some processing power is taken by the software, read and write speeds of your RAID configuration, along with other operations carried out on the server can be slowed down by it. Software RAID tends to be slower than hardware RAID. It also permits users to reconfigure arrays without being restricted by the hardware RAID controller. The cost is lower because no additional hardware RAID controller is required. Unlike hardware RAID, software RAID uses the processing power of the operating system in which the RAID disks are installed. If your RAID controller fails, you have to find a compatible one to replace in order to get the RAID system to perform the way you set it up. Replacing failed disk is simple – Just plug it out and put in a new one.Īs hardware RAID requires additional controller hardware, the cost is higher than software RAID. Thus, more space and speed can be used to read and write data. The RAID controller does not take processing power away from the disks it manages. Hardware RAID is dedicated processing system, using controllers or RAID cards to manage the RAID configuration independently from the operating system.
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Softraid 6 driver#
The RAID can be implemented either using a special controller (hardware RAID), or by an operating system driver (software RAID). It is a way to virtualize multiple, independent hard disk drives into one or more arrays to improve performance, capacity and reliability. The Linux also tests and reports optimal algorithm for RAID redundancy syndrome calculation for your system on boot, so you can check which one it will use and how fast it'll perform by reading boot logs.RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. You can also limit its load by limiting the check rate by setting /sys/block/md125/md/sync_speed_max with some arbitrary value ( 200000, meaning 200 MB/sec is the default).
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This calculation is quite intensive for the CPU, so it's better to run this check when your system doesn't have much load. Linux software RAID uses a field that enables RAID6 with no more than 257 active devices (not counting hot spares). A second syndrome is calculated using quite sophisticated mathematics called Galois field. While first parity syndrome is really simply XOR, the second one is not. It is very useful to run the check periodically as it not only will correct misswrites, but also detect and kick out of array dying devices early, so better set up this check to be invoked via system scheduler (cron or systemd timers). You can monitor status via /proc/mdstat file or mdadm -detail /dev/md125. It'll report any important messages to kernel log readable via dmesg. This is important for modern very large disks. For RAID6 it will also correct a single-mismatch errors (when just one drive is went out of sync) by using all the rest drives, thanks to dual parity which enables detection of dual errors and correction of single errors, include those could have happened due to the disk bit error rate. It will read all the drives, compute parity stripes and check if they're correct. Run (replace md125 with your actual array): echo "check" > /sys/block/md125/md/sync_action