Re: RAID controllers
* Erik Mouw (erik@harddisk-recovery.com) wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 11:37:25AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 05:23:05PM +0200, Jerome Warnier wrote:
> > > Anybody here has an experience with Sil3114 or Areca RAID SATA
> > > controllers?
> > >
> > > I'm wondering which one is best on AMD64, or if I stick with a 3Ware
> > > Escalade 8600 instead.
> > >
> > > I'm planning to use Debian Sarge, of course.
> >
> > I haven't used any of them, but from what I have read, the 3ware drivers
> > are very mature and have been around for a while. The Areca drivers I
> > suspect you have to compile and install yourself (making installing
> > somewhat more difficult on one).
>
> The -mm kernels come with Areca drivers. they are at at least included
> in 2.6.13-rc3-mm1. Andrew Morton keeps a set of broken out patches, so
> you can also patch other kernels:
>
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc3/2.6.13-rc3-mm1/broken-out/
>
> I think you need areca-raid-linux-scsi-driver.patch and
> areca-raid-linux-scsi-driver-fix.patch (in that order).
>
> > The few benchmarks I have seen indicate the 3ware is easily the
> > fastest of them.
>
> The benchmarks in the respected german computer magazine c't suggests
> the Areca cards are faster.
Areca according to the benchmarks is definitely a better card. I don't
remember when I read but I did review of a bunch of RAID controllers
done under Linux. Depending on you need you would need to decide if you
want to use a host based or an intelligent RAID controller. I would
personally go with the intelligent RAID controller. The advantage of
using Areca is that they have native SATA support unlike 3ware or
adaptec which have their proprietary crap which is still light years
behind. You don't get the bang for the money. But if you want tried and
tested RAID controller I would go with the 3ware/adaptec. If you are
going towards a host based controller I would suggest looking at the
Raid Core BC 4852 controller. Its supposed to be really good, not sure
about the linux support.
Bharath
---
Bharath Ramesh <bramesh@vt.edu> http://csgrad.cs.vt.edu/~bramesh
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