My home file server has software (mdadm) RAID5. Recently I added a 5th drive to expand the array and immediately noticed a performance slowdown. It's still fast enough to e.g., stream videos, but the peak throughput is crap (< 2 MB/s). Given the load average will spike with no program reporting any sort of CPU or memory usage I figure it's gotta be a ton of XOR calculations.
My initial reaction was to just buy a RAID card but I thought I ought to check here first. With that in mind -
If your goal was to increase existing raid performance sufficiently well that you could expect to add a 6th drive and have performance of at least 5 MB/s would you ...
- Buy a "hardware raid" controller card. What brand(s) would you recommend? I was looking at a 3ware card on ebay. Can anyone out there weigh in on this choice versus whatever they would do?
- If you think there's an alternative solution, I'd love to hear it
Thanks!
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