Re: Areca SATA cards
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:47:00PM +0200, Hans du Plooy wrote:
> >small ones. Instead we have purchased some of the new LSI cards (MegaRAID
> The fan concerns me too, but there are ways around that. I have a very
> bad taste in my mouth with LSI. I have a SATA 150-6, which is supposed
> to be true hardware raid. I have tried it on Sarge, Etch, Sid, SLES9,
> SUSE 9.3, with all possible combinations of kernel and drivers, and
> right now I finished testing it on Win2k3 server, and it performs like a
> dog with 4 discs in raid5. Worse than a single disc does. I've had the
> card replaced - no joy. So I think I'll give LSI a skip. All that's
> left then is Areca or 3ware (at least in my part of the world.
LSI has two series of cards AFAIK, you can guess their type based on the
ending of its name. If there's no X, then it's built upon older Intel
I/O processors, if there's an X, it uses the newer one. The differences
are quite significant since the old one is much-much slower (like the
one you've tested). I'm not quite sure in their specs, but
the old series
- use i960-based I/O processors
- are clocked around 100 MHz
- use simple SDRAM
- use 64 bit/66 MHz PCI interface
whilst the new series
- use ARM-based I/O processors
- are clocked much faster: 3-400 MHz
- use DDR SDRAM (DDR266 and DDR333)
- use 64 bit/133 MHz PCI-X, or PCI Express interface.
Of course you can check the exact specs at Intel's site.
I have an Intel SRCU42X SCSI RAID card, which is a rebranded LSI Logic
320-2X really, upgraded with 512 MB battery-backed cache (and it's much
cheaper than the LSI equivalent in Hungary). All I can say about its
performance is awesome, I'm completely satisfied with it. :)
However what worries me about the SATA 300-8X is that its cache memory
is embedded and not expandable.
Regards,
Gabor
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