Hi
I am trying to find a good PCI 64 SSI 320 raid controller to use with Centos & 4 10k drives as raid 1 & 0 to get the best I/O speed, any clues as to what people have found to be the best.
Thanks
Denis
3ware is good. CLI and managment tools as well
On 11/6/05, Denis Croombs denis@croombs.org wrote:
Hi
I am trying to find a good PCI 64 SSI 320 raid controller to use with Centos & 4 10k drives as raid 1 & 0 to get the best I/O speed, any clues as to what people have found to be the best.
Thanks
Denis
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 11:07 +0000, Denis Croombs wrote:
Hi I am trying to find a good PCI 64 SSI 320 raid controller to use with Centos & 4 10k drives as raid 1 & 0 to get the best I/O speed, any clues as to what people have found to be the best.
If you want a non-blocking, high-performance RAID stripe/mirror stream, I would highly recommend ATA protocol instead of SCSI. SCSI adds unnecessary overhead.
If you're going for minimum latency, then go for Western Digital Raptor 10K SATA drives. They roll of the same assembly line as Hitachi's 10K U320 drives.
If you're going for maximum DTR, then go for the higher capacity SATA drives, such as Seagate's 24x7 rated NL35 (near-line enterprise) series.
And in all those cases, I recommend 3Ware Escalade 8506 series cards with their non-block ASIC+SRAM design. Depending on how much performance you need, two cards on two different PCI-X channels would be most ideal.
Denis Croombs wrote:
Hi
I am trying to find a good PCI 64 SSI 320 raid controller to use with Centos & 4 10k drives as raid 1 & 0 to get the best I/O speed, any clues as to what people have found to be the best.
Unless you've already got a pile of SCSI drives, you might want to consider a good SATA RAID card (like the 3Ware 9500S or the new 9500SX) and 4 74gig WD Raptor drives. That would probably be at LEAST as fast and substantially less expensive. These days, I don't think I'd use SCSI for anything unless I was already sitting on a pallet full of drives that I couldn't unload.
Cheers,
Unless you've already got a pile of SCSI drives, you might want to consider a good SATA RAID card (like the 3Ware 9500S or the new 9500SX)
This is the first time I've seen the 95x0SX mentioned. Does anyone know if it works with the regular 3ware kernel sata driver or does it require a driver disk during installation?
Regards, Harald
HaraldFinnås wrote:
Unless you've already got a pile of SCSI drives, you might want to consider a good SATA RAID card (like the 3Ware 9500S or the new 9500SX)
This is the first time I've seen the 95x0SX mentioned. Does anyone know if it works with the regular 3ware kernel sata driver or does it require a driver disk during installation?
I'm not sure. I ordered one with their multilane connectors. I've got a need for a few 6TB arrays (16 x 400gig) so I thought I'd roll a test rig to beat up on before spending any real money. If anyone has used these, I'd love to hear from you.
Cheers,
HaraldFinnås wrote:
Unless you've already got a pile of SCSI drives, you might want to consider a good SATA RAID card (like the 3Ware 9500S or the new 9500SX)
This is the first time I've seen the 95x0SX mentioned. Does anyone know if it works with the regular 3ware kernel sata driver or does it require a driver disk during installation?
The 9550sx Needs a Driver Disc.
- K
On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 00:29 +0100, Harald=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Finn=E5s?= wrote:
This is the first time I've seen the 95x0SX mentioned.
It's the 9550SX. Don't confuse it with the 9500S.
The 9550SX adds a PowerPC 400 series embedded microprocessor for off- loading RAID-5/buffering to the traditional 64-bit ASIC design.
The 9500S has only the 64-bit ASIC, and does buffering to DRAM directly (not nearly as capable).
The 9550SX really raises the bar on feature support of the 3Ware products, putting some things in hardware that people are paying storage vendors for doing in software (typically in a dedicated, external storage device).
Does anyone know if it works with the regular 3ware kernel sata driver or does it require a driver disk during installation?
From what I can tell, it can use the existing "3w-9xxx" driver. But you
should definitely build the new 9.3.0.1 release (as well as upgrade the 3DM2 release) to support the added capabilities of the added PowerPC.
Bryan J. Smith wrote:
Does anyone know if it works with the regular 3ware kernel sata driver or does it require a driver disk during installation? From what I can tell, it can use the existing "3w-9xxx" driver. But you
should definitely build the new 9.3.0.1 release (as well as upgrade the 3DM2 release) to support the added capabilities of the added PowerPC.
The built in (into 2.6.9-22.EL ) 3w-9xxx drivers work with : 0x13c2 0x1001 and 0x1002 boards but the 9550sx shows up as :
0x13c1 0x1003 "3w-9xxx" "3Ware 9500 series Storage Controller"
grab the latest drivers from their website, build and use. works fine.
I have a driver disc image for anaconda that works with the CentOS4 way of doing things ( you need a differnet install time and run time kernel module ). If anyone is interested, let me know offlist. I'll err *cough* *cough* help out.
Reason why I am not posting it online anywhere :
"You may not make or distribute copies of the AMCC Product, or electronically transfer the software from one computer to another over a network."
( thanks to Jim Perrin, #centos @ irc.freenode.net for finding this gem of a distribution license )
- K
On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 01:16 +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Bryan J. Smith wrote:
Does anyone know if it works with the regular 3ware kernel sata driver or does it require a driver disk during installation?
The built in (into 2.6.9-22.EL ) 3w-9xxx drivers work with : 0x13c2 0x1001 and 0x1002 boards but the 9550sx shows up as :
0x13c1 0x1003 "3w-9xxx" "3Ware 9500 series Storage Controller"
grab the latest drivers from their website, build and use. works fine.
I have a driver disc image for anaconda that works with the CentOS4 way of doing things ( you need a differnet install time and run time kernel module ). If anyone is interested, let me know offlist. I'll err *cough* *cough* help out.
Reason why I am not posting it online anywhere :
"You may not make or distribute copies of the AMCC Product, or electronically transfer the software from one computer to another over a network."
( thanks to Jim Perrin, #centos @ irc.freenode.net for finding this gem of a distribution license )
You make it sound as if Jim picked the license!
Have you approached 3ware to see if they will allow Centos to distribute their driver? If you prefer not to do this yourself, would you mind if I contacted them on your behalf as an interested 3rd party?
Regards,
David Johnston
David Johnston wrote:
Reason why I am not posting it online anywhere :
"You may not make or distribute copies of the AMCC Product, or electronically transfer the software from one computer to another over a network."
( thanks to Jim Perrin, #centos @ irc.freenode.net for finding this gem of a distribution license )
You make it sound as if Jim picked the license!
:)
Have you approached 3ware to see if they will allow Centos to distribute their driver? If you prefer not to do this yourself, would you mind if I contacted them on your behalf as an interested 3rd party?
go for it!! my 3 emails to them never got a reply.
Even the drivers we sent over to them for hosting in their contributed section, never saw daylight.
- K
go for it!! my 3 emails to them never got a reply.
Even the drivers we sent over to them for hosting in their contributed section, never saw daylight.
This appears to have changed recently. They're now listing centos as a supported OS, and have the drivers listed for download in the forum. http://3ware.com/support/OS-support.asp http://www.3ware.com/kb/article.aspx?id=14546 toward the bottom
-- Jim Perrin System Architect - UIT Ft Gordon & US Army Signal Center
Jim Perrin wrote:
go for it!! my 3 emails to them never got a reply.
Even the drivers we sent over to them for hosting in their contributed section, never saw daylight.
This appears to have changed recently. They're now listing centos as a supported OS, and have the drivers listed for download in the forum. http://3ware.com/support/OS-support.asp http://www.3ware.com/kb/article.aspx?id=14546 toward the bottom
Jim,
thanks for this info! looks nice.
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Bryan J. Smith -
Ceg Ryan -
Chris Mauritz -
David Johnston -
Denis Croombs -
HaraldFinnås -
Jim Perrin -
Karanbir Singh