What is the difference betwen software raid and hardware raid?

what is the difference between software raid and hardware raid and can anyone tell me what the best software is available for software raid 5?
Answer:

Software raid relies on the OS and software to do the raid calculations and disk writes so there is an overhead to using this type of raid on a server. Hardware raid is done by a specific hardware card and the overhead is off server and the server gets it max throughput as well as the raid benefits. Its normally the OS that does software raid so Windows or Linux. Check here for more information - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID Hope this helps you out.

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Software RAID means that some software application is performing the disk operations associated with RAID. Windows 2000 and 2003 have built-in RAID capability. Your CPU is performing these operations, so the server takes a performance hit. For this reason it is rarely used. Hardware RAID means there is an expansion card performing the RAID operations. It is much faster for two reasons. First of all the operating system do not have to perform the RAID operations (in fact they are totally unaware of the underlying disk structure). Plus the RAID card is optimized to speed disk operations even more. Given the low cost of the hardware and the performance boost, it is pretty much a no brainer! Hope this helps!

emmittnervend

I completely agree with the proceeding. The other thing to bear in mind is that software RAID, particularly with ATA drive is very unreliable, this equally applies to modern SATA II drives. Even in a RAID 1 'mirrored' array you cannot guarantee against data loss. Also, the overhead of managing the RAID software completely negates any parformance benefit striping, RAID 5, would provide. Software RAID is complete waste of time.

themainliner

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