From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Feb 13 21:54: 8 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from portal.gmu.edu (portalknot.gmu.edu [129.174.0.8]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 35D2A37B400 for ; Wed, 13 Feb 2002 21:54:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from gmu.edu (mail01.gmu.edu [129.174.0.6]) by portal.gmu.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA07811 for ; Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:54:04 -0500 (EST) From: To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Message-ID: Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:54:04 -0500 X-Mailer: Netscape Webmail MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Language: en Subject: Re: Best ATA RAID controller X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Here's what I've been able to find: The 6000 series is in "end of life" except for the Escalade 6410. In my somewhat limited search I found the best price at Hyper Microsystems, http://www.hypermicro.com/store/index.htm. Their price for a 6410 with cables, etc. is $119 US. For those who aren't familiar, this is a 4- channel ATA-66 RAID controller. It supports up to 8 drives with slaves. I called 3Ware and they informed me that the maximum supported disk drive size is 160GB. That is per drive, not total. So you can have a maximum capacity of 1.28TB of storage, using RAID 0. Not too shabby, eh? Even my collection of MP3 live sets isn't _that_ big ;) The benchmarks that I could find indicate that minimal performance gain is achieved by going to the Escalade 7xxx series, unless you need RAID 5. In that case, the 7450 is very much on top. Also, using a 64-bit PCI slot provides relatively minimal gain vs. 32-bit due to the limitations of ATA disks and the host system. The authors of almost every benchmark or review of these cards, and ATA RAID in general, started off by heralding the 3Ware controllers and referred to the "anticipation" experienced while they were waiting for the various controllers because of their high expectations and past experiences. That's a definite plus in my book. I don't have the independent benchmark numbers offhand but, 3Ware claims something like 75MB/s write speeds for their cards when using RAID 0. I think their numbers are for a 4 drive array. To put this in networking terms, a fully saturated OC3, 155Mb/s, is just over 19MB/s. Of course, you don't really get 155Mb/s due to various factors, just as a T1 won't really give you a full 1.54Mb/s. This is important for those considering using one of these controllers on a networked server. In other words, these controllers will take most any network load experienced by business class file servers. A gigabit link on the otherhand has a theorectical throughput of 125MB/s so be careful in those environments. FWIW, those who have expressed interest in RAID 5 should note that using RAID 5 arrays of over 4 or 5 disks will begin to incure significant overhead and greatly reduce performance. If you are running a database server or the like with this setup you may want to consider a reconfiguration. Block size and other filesystem settings can cause significant performance gains or losses. Tune your db and RAID array to find the optimal setting for your environment. The defaults are not the best for every situation. I might have forgotten something but, if I remember, I'll get back. Regards, Steve p.s. Please don't buy up all of the 6410s. I need two and haven't made my purchase yet ;) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message