Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Chuck Swiger wrote:
>> Please be aware that RAID-5 is best suited for read-only and read-mostly
>> volumes.  RAID-5 is not well-suited for write-mostly volumes, although your
>> expected transaction rates seem to be low enough that you ought to be OK.
> 
> Actually, the Escalade controllers do a pretty good job of caching and
> writing in bulk, if you're writing sequentially and fast enough.

I believe you.  :-)  Sequential writes which are larger than the RAID-5 stripe 
size are relatively easy to handle efficiently, particularly if you've got a 
caching RAID controller handy to assist.

The tough case is lots of very small writes, such as CVS operations, software 
builds, some common database access patterns.  RAID-10 does much better than 
RAID-5 for small writes.

-- 
-Chuck