your advice on vinum, RAIDs

[Jim Pazarena]

Chuck Swiger wrote: (in freebsd-questions)
>
> When choosing RAID levels, you are making a tradeoff between
> performance, reliability, and cost:
>
> If you prefer...             ...consider using:
> -----------------------------------------------
> performance, reliability:    RAID-1 mirroring
> performance, cost:           RAID-0 striping
> reliability, performance:    RAID-1 mirroring (+ hot spare, if possible)
> reliability, cost:           RAID-5 (+ hot spare)
> cost, reliability:           RAID-5
> cost, performance:           RAID-0 striping
>
> If you've got enough drives, using RAID-10 or RAID-50 will also improve
> performance compared to stock RAID-1 or RAID-5 modes.

I just upgraded from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 on a dual processor AMD-64 system,
and MySQL now cannot keep up with the processing it needs to do.

I need at least 500Gb for my MySQL customers, and am using a couple of
750Gb SATA drives - non raid.

I was advised to switch to SAS for better performance. And to RAID for the
500Gb which I need.

I see the RAID section in the 7.0 GENERIC kernel of:
aac
aacp
ida
mfi
mlx
pst
twe


Could someone please advise my best course of action for RAID? That is,
the best controller (driver) to be using, and the most advisable method
to provide myself with perhaps 750Gb of storage in a SAS & AMD environment?
Or, would SATA work just as well for me under the correct RAID environment?

Extreme thanks!

Jim