Setting up a Gentoo RAID box - 300MB/sec possible?

[dan_aka_jack]

Hi there,

I edit uncompressed video on a Windows XP system but I also have a bit of a fetish for Linux and I'm thinking of building a Linux box which will basically be my RAID array. It needs to deliver about 300MBytes/sec.

Several questions:

1) Will a Linux "software SATA RAID" system be able to read and write at 300MBytes/sec in RAID5 or RAID6 with, say, 10 disks with maybe an AMD X2 processor? I know that a Windows XP software RAID5 array would never get near 300MB/sec.

2) How do I then connect my Linux box to my Windows PC? Could I bond 4 gigabit ethernet pipes and run iSCSI over that 4Gbps pipe?

Why would I want a Linux software RAID solution instead of a dedicated PCI-E hardware controller? Several reasons:

1) A Linux box could have many disks connected to it. Dedicated RAID controllers have a well defined maximum limit (e.g. 4 or 8 or 12 disks).

2) If hardware RAID controllers die then you could be seriously stuck without a RAID array. A Linux software array will be usable in many years' times.

3) If I have a dedicated Linux box running my RAID array then I can teach the linux box to do clever things like email me on SMART errors and I can also get the Linux box to do tape backups etc.

Many thanks,
Jack
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[fangorn]

I think the main problem is the connection.

You would need 4 single pcie slots on both machines to insert the 4 needed GBit/s NICs (maybe 3 in each machine will suffice). I dont know if windows is able to bind 3 or 4 nics in a efficient way. As data is striped over all NICs of the bridge, windows seeing 4 Gbit ports would not be of any help. And I dont know of the performance of the network stack.

Sure thing is that PCI is not sufficient as all Ports share the theoretical bandwidth of 133 MByte/s.
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[dan_aka_jack]

Hi!

Thanks loads for the reply.

My plan would be to use a 4-port network card from a manufacturer like Intel on both machines. I believe the port bonding can be done at the driver level on Windows and so Windows just sees a single 4-gigabit network connection. I could be wrong though!

Jack
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