Re: Raid Card controller for FC System



Edward,

Most modern motherboards will all you to have 4 or 6 SATA drives connected, so the cheap solution is to use Linux software raid, that's the best bang for your buck you're gonna get :), on the other hand, if you're interested in higher spec try this:

$325 - http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp

Fedora 8 kernel includes drivers for this card.

This card has lots of very nice features, firstly the drives can be configured as JBOD, so it can act as a simple controller allowing you to use Linux Software Raid, it has 256MB write cache, You can buy a BBU separately as shown here:

http://store.3ware.com/?category=2&subcategory=6&productid=BBU-MODULE-04

The nice thing about the above, is it does not sit on the same card - it uses an extender cable + a dummy slot (high or low profile).

Performance on these cards are excellent, "but only if configured correctly" - Use the right file system for the job.

The website states "delivering over 800MB/s RAID 6 reads and 600MB/s RAID 6 writes.", but you will not achieve this with 4 disks. you will probably achieve 2.5x your normal read/write performance, so if you're drives give you 100MB/s you can except around 250MB/s read using Raid 5. i.e. this card reads & writes to all drives in parallel - which is what you expect from hardware raid.

I have the 12 Port version on my desktop and have 8x1TB drives in a Raid 5 array and I get 624MB/s+ writing and 750MB/s reading (both on a file size of 100G+).

http://www.g-b.net/mythbox1.jpg
http://www.g-b.net/mythbox2.jpg
http://www.g-b.net/mythbox3.jpg
http://www.g-b.net/mythbox4.jpg
http://www.g-b.net/mythbox5.jpg

Note: This card should not be confused with the old 955xx cards, they're not so good.

Other nice features are hot-swap and auto-rebuild, nice web interface as well a a useful (but binary) command line interface - which allows monitoring IOPs and setting lots of lower level functions (such as drive-level cache etc..), it also has an A/V mode, when enabled it will not start verifying your disks in the middle of a job.

Make sure you have the same drives with the same firmware version, as this can cause performance problems. The monitoring tools will allow you spot a slow / problematic disk easily before they become a problem.

There is also a nice cabling solution - i.e. 1 to 4 breakout cable included.

BTW: This card is PCI Express x8 but will operate in slower or faster slots (mine is x16)

If possible use 3GB/s drives (SATA II), they'll give you the edge - I gain 50MB/s when this is enabled using 8 drives :)

Most smart-mon-tools functions work with the card as expected, in addition some, but not all power functions work, so you "can" issue "sdparm -C stop /dev/sdc" to spin down an entire array for example.

It took me a long time to get the performance I expected from this card, mostly due to Raid alignment and using XFS file system. - Ext3 is a dog on Raid 5 :(

Albert.





edwardspl@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Dear All,

Which model / type of ATA Raid card controller is good for work with New FC System ?
Would you please recommend ?

Thank for your help !

Edward.


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