Re: PCI Express 2.0 SATA 3 host bus adapter
On 7/11/2013 11:23 PM, David Christensen wrote:
> On 07/10/13 23:12, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>
> On 07/11/13 09:25, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
>
> Thank you both for your insights. :-)
>
>
> Stan - I assume you mean the Adaptec 6405E:
>
> https://www.adaptec.com/en-us/products/series/6e/
Yes. Did I type 6805E? That's the 8 port version. The 4 port model is
PCIe 2.0 x1.
> That looks like a nice card, and Adaptec is a name I respect. I infer
It's the best little SOHO RAID card for the money IMO, and the most
flexible WRT PCIe slots, as just about every desktop mobo today has an
x1 slot. It will also work in x4. Most of the better RAID cards are
x8, very few are x4. LSI doesn't even offer an x4 real RAID card.
Their 3Ware division might still offer one.
> from your posts that to use the product correctly, I should buy matching
> HDD's, after checking Adaptec's compatibility report?
>
> https://www.adaptec.com/en-us/_common/compatibility/
Yep. You can try using dissimilar drives with a real RAID card such as
this, but it's always a gamble. If it kicks a drive(s) it doesn't like,
can you swap or get a refund? Do you really want to waste time screwing
around with that situation, 3-5 days out and back, 6-10 days total
waiting on a replacement? Been there, done that. It's a huge PITA, a
waste of valuable time, and it prevents bringing the system up. In my
case the drives were always the same vendor and same model, but had
sufficiently different firmware to cause problems. It's been many years
since I ran into that. Since then I've always obtained drives with
matching firmware, or flashed them before building the array. Today's
cards may be more forgiving. I simply won't take the chance due to
prior experience.
> Do you have any experience with the Hybrid RAID mode?
Nope. I don't find any added value in it. Actually I find decreased
value. Slapping a cheap non redundant SSD onto your relatively
expensive hardware RAID card to simply have a larger high speed buffer
eats a $50 port that can be part of a RAID set. You can attach that SSD
to a free mobo SATA port and use cleancache with similar benefit,
without eating a valuable RAID port. If you only have 4 RAID ports this
is a big deal. If going the cleancache route you also increase
aggregate filesystem device bandwidth, 5 ports vs 4.
> Henrique - your arguments regarding software RAID and mixed drives make
> sense from a single-point-of-failure viewpoint. Do you consider SATA
> drives okay for workstation/SOHO server use, or should I go with SAS?
Consumer grade SATA is fine, especially if using software RAID. Or if
using a RAID card that supports such drives. Consumer grade SATA drives
are significantly cheaper than enterprise SATA or SAS drives. A 3TB
Seagate Barracuda 7.2k SATA3 consumer drive is ~$140. Their 3TB
Constellation series enterprise SAS 7.2k drive is $300.
> Does anybody have any comments or recommendations for inexpensive 2- or
> 4-port SATA3 HBA's (or SATA2 HBA's, or SATA[123] RAID cards used as
> HBA's), such as products made by SIIG or Promise?
It's odd to see you inquire about using SAS drives that run $300 each,
then ask for a cheap HBA solution. Then again, your original post
requested HBA info for connecting a single drive now, and possibly
expanding to RAID later. Given those criteria, your money is best spent
on one of these. Read the customer reviews after you gasp at the low
price.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124027
Then buy a 2nd one later when you get up to 3/4 drives and implement
md/RAID. You'll have invested less than $12/port. Sil 3132 has
universal Linux distro compatibility, and enough bus throughput for 2
rusty drives, ~125MB/s per drive.
> http://www.siig.com/it-products/controllers-storage/serialata/pcie/dp-sata-6gb-s-2-port-pcie.html
$50 is ridiculously high for a cheap 2 port SATA HBA. Siig is no better
quality than Syba, Koutech, etc. They all buy the same boards from the
same Chinese manufacturers and slap their sticker on em.
SATA3 is good for 600MB/s simplex, 1.2GB/s duplex. This is a PCIe 2.0
x1 card. This bus supports 500MB/s simplex, 1GB/s duplex. One of its
two SATA ports can saturate the PCIe bus. You're better off with a
cheaper PCIe 2.0 x1 SATA2 card, whose two SATA ports combined just
barely saturate the PCIe bus.
Note: unless you plan on connecting a couple of SF22xx series SSDs
there's no need for SATA3. If you do plan on this you need an x4 PCIe
slot. SATA2 at 300MB/s is double the throughput of the fastest spinning
rust drives thus a SATA2 card is what you really want/need.
> http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?region=en-US&m=572&rsn1=5&rsn3=9
The low range of the TX4 series are all PCIe 1.0 x1, even the 4 port
model. With that one you're limited to 60MB/s per SATA port. If you
step up to the higher end of the range the boards are x4 and x8, and the
price is similar to an Adeptec or LSI, which are both much better cards.
--
Stan
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