Re: RAID controllers
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bharath Ramesh" <bramesh@vt.edu>
To: "Erik Mouw" <erik@harddisk-recovery.com>
Cc: "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>; "Jerome Warnier" <jwarnier@beeznest.net>; "debian-amd64" <debian-amd64@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 1:31 AM
Subject: 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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A few weeks ago, I have been done some benchmark with areca and 3ware9500.
I used my own benchmark program which issue sequeuntil read and write request.
Result :::
1 ~ 10 client : roughly areca is better than 3ware about 15%.
10 ~20 client : almost same.
20 ~ client : 3ware performance is stable, but areca is not draw stable performance graph.
I think that areca raid driver is not matured
Test Environment :::
kernel 2.4.27 stock
2.6.12 stock
filesystem xfs
network protocol : NFS
nfs client : 2.4.21
architeture : Intel xeon 2.4GHz
memory : 2G
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