In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a raid controller card inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. Hardware raid will cost more, but it will also be free of software raid s. I do agree though, that hardware raid is the best choice on business class windows servers or even important. Windows software raid has a bad reputation, performance wise, and even storage space seems not too different. For things like simple mirroring raid1 the data just needs to be written twice and the drive controller can do that itself with instructions from the kernel so no need to get cpu involved at all. This works the same for larger servers as well as desktop computers. Whether software raid vs hardware raid is the one for you depends on what you need to do and how much you want to pay. Raid stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. Therefore both are susceptible to bugs in software. A raid can be deployed using both software and hardware. Numerous operating systems support raid configuration, including those from apple, microsoft, various linux flavors as well as openbsd. It means more people can fix problems as compare to a closed source. Software raid in the real world backdrift backdrift.
Windows software raid vs hardware raid ars technica. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a special raid controller inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. Software vs hardware raid nixcraft linux tips, hacks. Today a server with a hardware raid controller reported when i say reported i actually mean lit a.
But the real question is whether you should use a hardware raid solution or a software raid solution. Difference between software raid and hardware raid in high level is presented in this video session. Hardware raid versus software raid red hat enterprise linux. After many years of running software raid setups in linux ive never run into a bug that caused data loss. How to set up software raid 1 on an existing linux distribution step 1. Software vs hardware raid performance and cache usage server. It is used to improve disk io performance and reliability of your server or workstation.
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