[mythtv-users] Contemplating a major change

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Stephen P. Villano
<stephen.p.villano at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/6/14, 12:49 PM, Raymond Wagner wrote:
....
>> The "hardware" part was key.  The only thing hardware RAID10 gives you
>> over software is ease of boot.  Hardware RAID is only beneficial when
>> you have to perform parity calculations, and even then it's largely
>> inconsequential on a modern CPU.
>> _______________________________________________
> For RAID10, perhaps, perhaps not. It's used in enterprise for a good reason.

And many of those enterprise controllers also have various
battery backed caches.  Which *can* have benefit for
certain workloads (often databases), although various
SSD devices are now the usual accelerator since the
logs tend to be small enough (even a ZIL on a large
ZFS installation can often fit in a reasonably priced
(for enterprise quality) SSDs), and the L2ARC is also
moving to SSDs for more performant target installations.

> That said, one' speaking of higher end hardware in the RAID controller
> than the usual card a consumer would acquire.
....
> That said, I've not found many inexpensive RAID cards out there
> (inexpensive as under $300) for current drives.

Pretty much the only thing one can find (in the sub-$300 category)
is enterprise RAID cards that are in the "new to you" market space
after having been removed from an enterprise server.  And you
usually have to plan to replace the battery, further reducing your
target price.

I suspect Raymond was responding to HW RAID10 cards
that consumers tend to purchase (or implement in their
BIOS via something like the ICHxR chipsets), and for
that, he is right.