Re: SATA and Raid

On Sat, 10 Jul 2004, KSchneider wrote:

> Ok, my fountain of knowledge, what kind of experience do any of you have
> with SATA Raid controllers? I'm researching a new system that I'm going to
> put together for a client and have no experience with anything other than
> SCSI and IDE. I've heard great things about SATA, however, and so would
> love to have your collective input...

Well, very briefly the server at the UAA Library which is hosting the
AKLUG list was running 16 250GB SATA drives, for a total of 4TB (that
server was retasked for fileserver duties, and the old server and scsi
array rebuilt and put back where it was). The controllers are 3Ware, but
I can't remember the model numbers--I think it's something like 7500 or
7800. Anyhow the box has a pair of 8-port controllers. We decided not to
use the onboard raid, but use Linux software raid instead. We're still
running into some kind of problem using both LVM and raid5, but it only
seems to be a performance impact, and only 10 - 20% at worst, as a seat of
the pants guess.

The SATA drives are nice because they're truly hot-swappable, are every
bit as reliable as SCSI drives, and are available in densities greater
than that available in SCSI. Currently, I think 400GB drives are the
largest available in SATA, but I may be wrong.

Mike
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Received on Sat Jul 10 21:27:19 2004