[cvsnt] Re: rough benchmarks...

[Luigi D. Sandon]

> if striping the drives helped (we backup and restore nightly to a hot 
> spare

Be aware that with just two disk and striping (RAID 0) failure of one disk 
will make the other unusable. Your machine will be off-line until the disk 
is replaced, and depending on the whole disk being striped or only the data 
partition, it will take some time to be available again.

I'd use a mirror, and if some more performance is needed, I'd add two more 
disk and set it up for RAID 1+ 0. This way a disk failure won't stop the 
server.

Also, I'd check if the chipset and SATA controller offer some hardware RAID 
features, most chipset now offer some kind of software + hardware RAID 
features.

Also, be aware that some controllers defaults to IDE compatible SATA mode. 
SATA controllers may offer AHC mode, thats should be more perfomant and 
coupled with the proper disks offer SCSI-like features like queue 
reordering.

-- 
Luigi D. Sandon