[CentOS] CentOS 6.0 and 3ware 9650SE series RAID Performance

[Craig White]

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


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