[silvrhand]

New cards in the market are removing this problem, see the Netcell SPU for an example of that.

"Revolution storage processing cards feature a revolutionary 100% hardware-based 64-bit RAID engine that offers a mainstream RAID solution with the simultaneous benefits of both RAID 0-class performance and RAID 5-class data protection."

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

RAID 5 will very likely perform less then RAID-10 for write operations, this even get worse when adding more disks (reason, a checksum of the sector for all disks must be calculated and written, the more disks, the more sectors to calculate). Some of the performance downgrade can be reduced by proper configuration and write back cache.

RAID-10 will (depending on the hardware implementation of the RAID-controller) be faster with writes simply because there is no checksum to calculate.

What performs better greatly depends on your Read/Write ratio and how sequential the data is that is read. For a board, writes are often much lower then reads, so the performance on writes should not have such a big impact.

http://tweakers.net/reviews/557/25

There is a great review there, and look at the mySQL results, this is in a mixed environment as well, so lots of read and writes where I'm mostly in the 25-30% write for our forums.

This is a very thorough test and the Areca ARC-1160 with 1GB cache shows a huge lead over most other cards in the test.

RAID 10 will beat RAID5 in HEAVY write tests, but in our scenario RAID5/10 arrays are very close to the same, at least for me in my < 30% write scenario. Your mileage MAY vary, I generalized a bit too much in my earlier posts.

FYI also:

The new ARC-1220/1230/1260 uses Intel? IOP333 I/O processor. So XOR calculations should be even better improving database performance. The review above was on the 1160, which uses an older I/O processor.