• From: Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-06-29
  • Posts: 1,420

Topic: Software Raid 0, Old 5400rpm drives, feasible?

I have come into possesion of an old tower, and happen to have an extra IDE drive.
I was thinking to speed the machine up, I could use raid 0 on the drives. However, I am not familiar with linux's software raid options (I have no interest in buying a hardware controller). Is this feasible, or is software raid too slow or heavy for an older machine?

just call me...
~FSM~
  • From: The Deep Midlands
  • Registered: 2011-01-28
  • Posts: 96

Re: Software Raid 0, Old 5400rpm drives, feasible?

Each flavour of RAID has its advantages or disadvantages.  I am not sure you'd notice a large performance decrease or increase with RAID 0 as the buses tend to throttle speed versus driver read/write speeds. It depends more on the application for the tower rather than the tower's performance per se.

A simple example is having a 100Mbps network at home, upgrading it to Gigabit but being stuck on a 2Mbps ADSL link. Whatever you network speed, the two ways of increasing performance is to get a high performance router or increase the ADSL link.. Excuse the poor analogy.

Enjoying a good !#
  • From: Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-06-29
  • Posts: 1,420

Re: Software Raid 0, Old 5400rpm drives, feasible?

I think you misunderstood Erinsfan.
I'm well aware of the workings of RAID. What I am asking is what is the overhead like for software-based raid, as I have never used it on linux before.

just call me...
~FSM~