Re: Hardware RAID advices needed
Kind regards
Hans du Plooy
SagacIT (Pty) Ltd
hansdp at sagacit dot com
Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
On lørdag 10 september 2005, 12:52, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
off your back?
Eh, right!
You did not get any recommendations. Your reason for purchase is
appealing. But the price differences are huge.
Yep, I didn't get any very specific recommendations, but a lot of good
information, many thanks to all respondents, so...
What are you going to do?
I haven't actually decided. However, I'm still evaluating three options.
The first is a dirt cheap Sunsway Sil 3112-based card, i.e. fakeraid.
How "old" is your PC? On my 2ghz AthlonXP I have onboard VIA (fakeraid)
plus a PCI Sil 3112a card. Raid-5 over four SATA discs give me in
excess of 50MB/s sustained write, depending on what I'm copying, with a
system load of about 2.00. I suspect there's some compression at play
somewhere, because a 1gb file filled with zeros copies at twice the
speed that SUSE install CD/DVD images do.
Anyway, I'm sure Raid-0 over 2 discs will require far less resources.
The second option is a 3ware 8006-2PL,
You can't go wrong.
The third option is to buy a SATA non-RAID controller and run SW RAID
entirely based on that.
I'm not sure if you even get that. I've never seen a SATA controller
that didn't have Raid. But then, if you think about it, it's all fake
raid, so all of them are non-raid. On my system, even if I configure
the raid in the controller's bios, linux still sees two discs, so it's
all the same - with the Sil_3112a chip the best is still to do md raid.
At least if something does break you have reliable and proven tools to
fix with.
There are some high-endish cards that support expansion and level
migrating, notably a HighPoint card.
Stay far far away. I have not worked with a single Highpoint (or
Promise for that matter) card was any good. If you search this list
archives, you'll find plenty of moaning and groanning about high point
controllers.
The 3ware solution is rather expensive, but not scarily so, that's the
main downside to it, and of course, the concern "what if the card
breaks", a situation which isn't quite clear.
http://cgi.ebay.com/3ware-8006-2LP-64-bit-PCI-SATA_W0QQitemZ5238559017QQcategoryZ39968QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
If your data is worth $45 to you, then this will see you through.
Hans
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