Software RAID -- Is is worth it?

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

I'm just wondering if anyone has experience with software raid. I'm specifically interested in something simple, like RAID 1 on an IDE interface. Does it appreciably slow down the system's hard disk performance?

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

Recent benchmarking at anandtech.com shows little change in performance with RAID 1 or 0.

Personally, I think you're better off using one drive for backups and swap. Use tar and/or rsync to keep backups, then if you screw your system up, you can rsync from the backups or boot from a livecd and untar your backups. RAID doesn't help when you do a careless "rm -rf"