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jdtate101 · Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 9:41 am Post subject: Which Hardware RAID Controller

Whilst upgrading to SuSE 10, I will do a fresh install, then recover data off usb external drive. I was thinking of upgrading to a Hardware RAID 5 solution of SATA disks (4 x 250GB Hitachi disks). What cards would people recommend? I want card to do the XOR parity calculation in hardware (most still do it via CPU), be supported in the latest kernels (2.6.11 -> ), and allow booting off the array.
_________________
Ubuntu Edgy & Beryl on:

AMD X2 4800+
4GB Corsair TWINX RAM
1.2TB RAID0 SATA2 (3ware RAID)
2 x Seagate 400GB USB2
Dual Layer DVD-RW
Nvidia 7800GT
2 x Viewsonic VP201b TFT
Iomega Rev Internal

drws · LXF regular Joined: Sat Aug 06, 2005 11:39 am Posts: 125

I haven't looked into if this card does a lot work on the CPU but check out 3ware. (www.3ware.com)
I've got a 4-port and a 8-port 9xxx series card (drivers either from 3ware or included in 2.6.9->)
The driver can also update the firmware on the card at the same time.

I've got them in servers running 64-bit RedHat Enterprise linux on dual AMd opterons, and the CPU usage is low (average <10% with 50 NFS clients read/write access over gigabit)
The servers boot from the card, and linux only sees one big hard disk, which means every partition can reside on the raid5.

jdtate101

From the 3ware site...HARDWARE only Smile

All 3ware products incorporate an onboard processor for true hardware RAID performance. Software RAID schemes use the system processor, occupy host memory, and consume CPU cycles. RAID reliability is compromised with software RAID, as the RAID system is vulnerable to an operating system corruption or crash. Performance measurements demonstrate that software RAID can rob the system of as much as 25% of its CPU cycles processing the RAID calculations instead of managing your applications.
_________________
Ubuntu Edgy & Beryl on:

AMD X2 4800+
4GB Corsair TWINX RAM
1.2TB RAID0 SATA2 (3ware RAID)
2 x Seagate 400GB USB2
Dual Layer DVD-RW
Nvidia 7800GT
2 x Viewsonic VP201b TFT
Iomega Rev Internal

jdtate101

Sorry also worth mentioning that this is for a high end workstation, 32bit not 64bit PCI.
_________________
Ubuntu Edgy & Beryl on:

AMD X2 4800+
4GB Corsair TWINX RAM
1.2TB RAID0 SATA2 (3ware RAID)
2 x Seagate 400GB USB2
Dual Layer DVD-RW
Nvidia 7800GT
2 x Viewsonic VP201b TFT
Iomega Rev Internal

ollie

This review may help - SATA RAID Review. However they all look to be PCI-X or the lonely PCIe version - I haven't seen any that are 32-bit PCI for a while now due to the data transfer rate limitations. One SATA-II drive can pump out more data than a PCI slot can really handle - SATA RAID.

Hope this helps Cool

Farslayer · Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2005 2:54 pm Posts: 31

Typically PCI cards are backwards compatible a 64 bit PCI card should plug into a 32 bit slot (part of the card edge will hang out of the slot) but the card will still function properly.