Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 17:30:40 -0400 (EDT) From: "David C. Snyder" <dsnyder@web.turner.com> To: Mario Pranjic <mario.pranjic@irb.hr> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, Orlando Lewis <Orlando.Lewis@cnn.com> Subject: Re: IDE RAID controlers od FreeBSD Message-ID: <20020903153141.Y792-100000@dcs-vaio.turner.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.32.0208281117590.5816-100000@nippur.irb.hr>
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Hello Mario, On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Mario Pranjic wrote: > Hi! > > Can anyone tell me if the current 4.6.2 RELEASE supports promise > fasttrak100tx2 or highpoint hpt370 RAID controlers? > > Does this actually work? I guess you've received lots of responses by now. I can add that I've tried three different ATA RAID controlers with FreeBSD 4.x: HighPoint HPT370 Promise FastTrack 100 Tx2 (both PCI and on-motherboard versions) 3ware Escalade 7210 (Now called 7000-2) I bought the HighPoint for around $50 a couple of years ago. It didn't work with a CD install and FreeBSD 4.3, but as of 4.5 and later, it works just fine from a CD install. On a pair of old 20 GB Maxtor drives, I see around 35 MB/s in a RAID-0 configuration. The Promise FastTrack 100 was $89 when I bought it locally a few months ago. I didn't do any testing in RAID-0, but in RAID-1, I got an average of 30 MB/s for reads and writes using a pair of 40 GB Maxtor drives (running iozone). One nice advantage of the Promise over the HighPoint is that it supports hot-swap. With your drives installed in a mobile rack like the Kingwin KF-101 or KF-32, you can power down (key-off) and remove a drive, replace it, and then use the atacontrol(8) command to re-build the (RAID-1) array, all without ever having to reboot! Works great. The 3ware which also supports hot-swap, was $125 from hypermicro.com and offers some significant performance and monitoring advantages over the Promise or HighPoint. For one, this card has an on-board write-cache. It also uses a different driver (twe) under FreeBSD instead of the ata-raid code, which seems to perform a bit better. I've been seeing an average of 43 MB/s reads and writes with a RAID-1 configuration. If you run the 3dmd daemon (binary provided by 3ware), you can configure your system to send you email anytime there is a RAID event (including reboots). I've also noticed that the 3ware provides more "SCSI-like" performance than the other two. By this, I mean that when I have multiple jobs all hitting the disks at the same time, the jobs run faster and smoother with the 3ware. For example, in one window, if I'm dd'ing a 4 GB file and in another I'm doing a "find /usr -ls", with the 3ware, both jobs clip along at a nice even pace. On the Promise or HighPoint, the find(1) command runs in starts and fits...at least until the dd(1) is complete! One thing to keep in mind about the 3ware is that there currently is no command-line tool for monitoring or managing the array (atacontrol will not work). I'm told that 3ware is working on this, but for now, you have to use the 3dmd daemon, which provides a web based interface. So, in summary, all three of these work fine with recent FreeBSD releases. The HighPoint or Promise would be fine choice for a workstation or lightly used server. For a heavily used server, you will be much happier with the 3ware. -- David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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