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 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.