I hate to bring up the raid card wars again, but... :)
It's pretty well established that 3ware is a good "real" hardware raid card for SATA drives.
So what is a good card for SCSI raid? My searches have come up with Adaptec and LSI as the main players here. Are the LSI MegaRAID cards "real" hardware raid? Which cards can give good raid 5 performance?
-- Bowie
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 at 11:00am, Bowie Bailey wrote
It's pretty well established that 3ware is a good "real" hardware raid card for SATA drives.
So what is a good card for SCSI raid? My searches have come up with Adaptec and LSI as the main players here. Are the LSI MegaRAID cards "real" hardware raid? Which cards can give good raid 5 performance?
Yes, the MegaRAIDs are "real" hardware RAID (a quick look at the specs shows the onboard IOP). I honestly don't know how they perform in RAID5 (I use mine for a cluster head node, just doing RAID1), but I'd make sure you get the PCI-X (or PCIe) versions rather than the regular PCI ones. The driver support is quite good, but the monitoring is a little tougher.
I've been shying away from Adapted for a while now, so I have no experience with them at all.
I agree, the LSI megaraid cards work much better then Adaptec cards. The only downside is that megaraid cards do not have good administration tools at all.
Ed Bailey
-----Original Message----- From: Joshua Baker-LePain [mailto:jlb17@duke.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 11:09 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] SCSI Raid
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 at 11:00am, Bowie Bailey wrote
It's pretty well established that 3ware is a good "real" hardware raid card for SATA drives.
So what is a good card for SCSI raid? My searches have come up with Adaptec and LSI as the main players here. Are the LSI MegaRAID cards "real" hardware raid? Which cards can give good raid 5 performance?
Yes, the MegaRAIDs are "real" hardware RAID (a quick look at the specs shows the onboard IOP). I honestly don't know how they perform in RAID5 (I use mine for a cluster head node, just doing RAID1), but I'd make sure you get the PCI-X (or PCIe) versions rather than the regular PCI ones. The driver support is quite good, but the monitoring is a little tougher.
I've been shying away from Adapted for a while now, so I have no experience with them at all.
-- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 at 11:25am, Edward R. Bailey wrote
I agree, the LSI megaraid cards work much better then Adaptec cards. The only downside is that megaraid cards do not have good administration tools at all.
Actually, I found that both megamgr and megactl work just fine for what they do. It's just that neither lend themselves very easily to automated monitoring. It can be done, but it's not as simple as firing up 3DM2.
point taken - I think I unconsciously compare most raid admin tools to 3DM2 in terms of ease of use. memamgr and megactl do work, but when one has more then a few machines to monitor LSI raid tools are not very helpful
-----Original Message----- From: Joshua Baker-LePain [mailto:jlb17@duke.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 11:32 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: RE: [CentOS] SCSI Raid
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 at 11:25am, Edward R. Bailey wrote
I agree, the LSI megaraid cards work much better then Adaptec cards. The only downside is that megaraid cards do not have good administration tools at all.
Actually, I found that both megamgr and megactl work just fine for what they do. It's just that neither lend themselves very easily to automated monitoring. It can be done, but it's not as simple as firing up 3DM2.
-- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Bowie Bailey wrote:
I hate to bring up the raid card wars again, but... :)
It's pretty well established that 3ware is a good "real" hardware raid card for SATA drives.
So what is a good card for SCSI raid? My searches have come up with Adaptec and LSI as the main players here. Are the LSI MegaRAID cards "real" hardware raid? Which cards can give good raid 5 performance?
Cards that don't use i960 cpus ( really ancient now =D ) and that have plenty of buffer ram (read, onboard RAM or DIMM modules or NVRAM) and of course, battery pack backup for the onboard memory.
So 3ware 85xx are out for raid 5 performance but 3ware 9xxx will perform given sufficient RAM as an example. I suspect the same for any SCSI RAID card with regard to RAID 5 performance.
Bryan J. Smith had a good explanation why quite some time ago on this list.
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Bowie Bailey -
Edward R. Bailey -
Feizhou -
Joshua Baker-LePain