On 03/06/2011 09:00 AM, compdoc wrote: > >> >Regarding the Marvell drivers, I had good luck with the 'sata_mv' driver >> >in Scientific Linux 6 just yesterday, running a pair of 4-port PCIe-x4 >> >Tempo 'Sonnet' controller cards. > Are those the Mac/Windows Sonnet cards that go for less than $200? > > What kind of performance you seeing? Are you doing software raid on them? Yes, those are the cards which target Windows and OS-X, but they work fine on Linux as well. They use the Marvell 88SX series chips. They control 6 2TB WD Caviar Black drives, arranged as 5 drives in a RAID-6 array with one hot spare. 3 drives are connected to each of two cards. mdstat shows array re-sync speed is usually over 100 MBytes/sec although that tends to vary quite a bit over time. > ------------------------------ > On 03/06/2011 09:00 AM, John R Pierce wrote: > > On 03/05/11 7:01 AM, Eero Volotinen wrote: >> > >> > areca works.. >> > >> > > for SAS, I prefer LSI Logic. The Supermicro mobo I'm using (X8DAL-3) has an on-board LSI 1068E SAS/SATA controller chip, although I have the RAID functionality disabled so I can use it as a bunch of drives for software RAID-6. Like the Tempo cards, it has 6 2TB WD SATA drives attached which provides a second set of arrays. Performance really sucks, for some unknown reason, and I get lots of I/O error messages logged when the drives get busy. There appears to be no data corruption, just a lot of retries that slow things down significantly. The LSI web site has no info about the errors. The firmware is passing back I/O abort code 0403 and LSI Debug info related to "channel 0 id 9". There are only 8 ports so I don't know which disk drive may or may not be causing problems. The SMART data on all disks shows no issues, although I tend to treat some SMART data with scepticism. I need to track this error down because my understanding is that the LSI controller chip has very good performance. Chuck