#1 Intel Xeon E3-1270, 4 Cores (8 HT) x 3.4 GHz (3.8 Turbo Boost), with 24 GB RAM, and Software Raid 1 #2 AMD Opteron 4274, 2 x 8 Cores x 2.5 GHZ (3.5 Turbo Core), with 32 GB RAM, and Hardware Raid 5 Note that the AMD configuration has a total of 16 cores though the cores are slower than the Xeon cores. And please note the different RAIDs: Software Raid 1 and Hardware Raid 5. For performance -- specifically page load speed of a database driven site (e.g., a vbulletin forum site), would the type of RAID matter much? Our forum thread load time is about 2 seconds (as measured by Pingdom) and we'd like to get that down to one second. I know there are some optimization things like browser caching of static files and all that, but I noticed that one significant part of the load time is the actual wait time for the php output (I can see that in the Pingdom report). I assume that's from either the speed of the database and/or execution of the php. (By the way we're using a Windows server and on Windows you can't run php as a module -- it's unstable -- so we're running it as fastcgi.) So one of my questions is, would there be any notable performance gain (improving page load time of forum threads and whatever) if we use hardware RAID 5 over software RAID 1? We'll be running different things on it (actually a lot more load than just the forum), but I'm sure either will be plenty of power with either configuration. But considering just the speed of the forum, do you think that #2 would really perform much better than #1? It's advertised as so, and doesn't cost much more than choice #1, but it is overkill and I wonder if choice #1 would perform just as well or even better, with the faster cores (though fewer cores), and I'm really not sure about the difference the Raid will make (between Software Raid 1 and Hardware Raid 2). Any advice greatly appreciated.
It depends on a number of factors so there is not likely a single, sure answer. But, hardware raid is almost always faster than software raid. It is also more "safe" in that it is less likely to experience data loss. RAID 5 has a reputation for taking a performance hit when used in a write intensive environment. In the scenario above a hardware controller with a cache would probably compensate for that.
SSD was not one of the choices the OP had to choose from ... But as long as they were brought up, there is the question of cost -- SSD is generally more expensive than HDD -- and reliability. This article is about a year old, but I haven't seen any benchmarks or reports on reliability more recent. SSD drives have a higher failure rate than HDD and, worse, if an SSD drive fails the data is gone. Unrecoverable. Oh, ****! http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html