On Fri, 2011-09-02 at 21:14 -0700, Drew wrote:
Additionally I can confirm as I also have several lsi cards and all perform like hell in r5/6 even with bbu.
Is that the "fast as hell" or "slow as hell" kind?
I ask because I have a couple of IBM M5015 (rebranded LSI 9260-8i) controllers that I run in RAID-10 and as I'm somewhat on a budget for disks (coming home with $1200 worth of 15k SAS drives will get me shot) I'd rather run a RAID-5/6 array if the performance degradation is minimal. And yes, mine do have the BBU. ;-)
Not that the performance of an 8x80GB SATA-300 array is much to write home about in the first place, but for my purposes it works fine.
---- I don't know how either of us could have made our opinions any more clear...
Don't use the 3ware/LSI SATA RAID controllers in RAID 5 or RAID 6 mode if performance and reliability are of concern. I only use hardware RAID because performance and reliability are my concern. I am told that the Areca cards are much better on RAID 5/6 but I have no first hand experience with them. While you may get better performance with write-back caching (don't enable without a BBU), the improvement is incremental. Stick with RAID 10.
Craig