Re: [opensuse] experience with large number of SATA drives ?

Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 13:27 +0100, Per Jessen wrote:
I'm putting together a hardware proposal for a new project - I/O
rates are paramount, so I'm looking at running e.g. 16 SATA-II drives
on a
single box. I have opted not to use SAS drives due to price and lack
of concurrency in the application. I'm thinking of using two fairly
inexpensive Intel SATA (for RAID0) controllers, each with 8 SATA
ports,
each in a PCIe x8 slot. Before I go and build the prototype, I was
just wondering if anyone's had any experience with running so many
SATA drives on a single mainboard?

The closest I have is 4 SATA. They are each receiving continuous
JPEG2000 image streams. The file system is XFS. I have had no trouble
at all. So that is at least one data point for you. Sorry I cannot say
anything about 16 disks. I think it must be more a question of what
the 16 disks will be doing more than that all are present.

In general terms, the box will be doing read data, process data, write
data on a small set of very large files striped across the disks. The
application throughput will be completely limited by the I/O rate. The
disks will (hopefully) be very busy delivering a solid stream of data.

One concern I have is scalability - I easily picture a box with 4 or 6
drives delivering very good I/O rates, but I can't help wondering if
there is some ceiling somewhere that I'm going to hit if I just add
more and more drives. There is of course a plain hardware/physical
limit, but 16 drives is still achieveable.
In selecting the controller(s), I'm looking at price per SATA port, and
I only need RAID0, but I have also been wondering about throughput,
e.g. is there any reason to think that a 4-port card might perform
better than an 8-port?

/Per

--
Per Jessen, Zürich (-0.8°C)

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