Looking at getting some Dell Workstations (T3500). One of the options is to raid 1 the harddrives (presumably this would give you a speed boost). Is this software or hardware raid?
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Looking at getting some Dell Workstations (T3500). One of the options is to raid 1 the harddrives (presumably this would give you a speed boost). Is this software or hardware raid?
http://www.dell.com/us/en/business/desktops/workstation-precision-t3500/pd.aspx?refid=workstation-precision-t3500&s=bsd&cs=04
"The T3500 uses an integrated SATA 3.0Gb/s host controller (part of the Intel chipset) and supports host based RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, an optional PCI-e SAS 6/ir controller supports SAS drives with host based RAID 0 or 1."
Hardware RAID I'd say.
Dells newer servers all have decent enough raid setups in Hardware. Generally only when you start looking at raid 10 or 01 that is becomes an issue. Some of their older cards were using tricks to get to a raid 10 level meaning losing a drive didn't always work as it should.
The T3500 does use HW raid on setup which is fine in a workstation. Monitoring for failures is easy enough in this situation.
You absolutely have to look at the raid card specifications, especially for Dells. For example, I have a 745N storage server that has possibly the worst RAID card imaginable. I get a mere 2MBps out of it using some large file copies when I had it in a 4-drive RAID5 (the default). Switching it to a JBOD configuration with RAID5 in software and I get 20MBps. Still not fantastic, but a whole lot better. Searching google it appears lots of other people have the same problem.
Sometimes RAID cards are little more than BIOS tricks to write the same data twice. This is especially common in workstation motherboards. It may have been a good thing once upon a time, but as CPUs are insanely fast and RAID calculations are quite easy, you'll only see a minor load on your CPU (my server that uses raid1 sees a 1% additional load on average)
The easiest way to check is to try it - large file copy using your RAID card, and again using software RAID. See what's faster. If you don't have this luxury, find the type of RAID chip that is being used and search for it - you'll quickly find out whether its a so-called 'fakeraid' or real raid card (ie one that has its own dedicated processor). Toms Hardware will often have benchmarks, and the linux raid driver page has a list of 'fakeraid' chips.
Looking at the spec (and a quick google), x58 chipset is a fakeraid controller.
No doubt if Dell is building the system, it'll be the BIOS option to raid the disks. I'd go without. You can set 2 drives up in RAID1 after installation using Windows (or Linux) software raid. You might be able to set it up after-installation in the BIOS, but I'm not sure about that option.
We have discussed a similar question so here is a direct link to answer your question.
See these related topics too:
Speed isn't a reason to specify RAID1 - any gains in one area are likely to be offset by losses in another area making the overall improvement hard to measure. If you need reliability, that would be a reason to go with RAID1.
Get the Perc 310 controller at the very least. The onboard is effective, but less than ideal, I've had trouble with that configuration often. The 310 uses the system processor to perform. The best choice from the factory is to get the 710, which uses it own processor and operates completely independent from the system processor. Beefy and fast, a good choice if you are processing lots of video or other very large files.