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I have a large number (more then a dozen) 3Ware 8500 and 9500 cards. |
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The majority of these are 12-port SATA cards with RAID 5 volumes on |
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them. |
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|
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Three quick observations: |
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|
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* Software RAID 5 on Linux WILL NOT remap bad blocks/sectors like a |
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hardware RAID controller. If you care about your data, software RAID |
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simply isn't an option. |
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|
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* The RAID 5 performance of 3Ware controllers is terrible. The 9500 |
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series cards can push 50-55MB/s with xfs and in the neighborhood of |
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45MB/s with ext3 (with an enlarged journal, etc.) for sequential writes, |
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random I/O is even worse. The 8500 cards are about 10% slower compared |
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to the 9500 once you fill up the on-card cache. |
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|
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* Neither xfs or ext3 are reliable on volumes greater then 2TB. Nor can |
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fdisk even partition them (but lvm2 can handle them). |
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|
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Cheers, |
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|
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-J |
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|
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-- |
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On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 12:36:08AM -0500, Francisco Perez wrote: |
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> Scott, |
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> I have a 3Ware Escalade 4 chaneel hardware raid controller running raid |
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> 10. Here are my thoughts: The card itself was $175.00 and the 4 250GB |
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> brives were $150 bucks a piece, so the cost is considerable. If you are |
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> only going to have two disks mirrored, you can get the two channel card |
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> and two drives and mirror them which is obviously less money. My system |
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> is a Tyan Transport GX-28 with 2 Opteron 246's and originally I had the |
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> drives on the onboard controller. First, there is a very noticable |
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> increase in performance going from the integrated (software) raid |
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> controller to the hardware raid controller. For my percieved needs it |
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> was definitely worth the money. Second, its a nice reassurance to know |
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> that if a drive (or even two drives) fails the hardware controller can |
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> restore the array by popping in a new disk without me having to do |
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> much...I'm not sure if this is the case with the integrated or linux |
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> raid. With the hardware controller, if I wanted a bit more storage |
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> space, I could have chosen to make a raid five array, something that as |
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> far as I know is unavailable in both integrated and Linux array (at |
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> least now without a significant performance hit.) Hope that helps. |
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> |
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> Frank |
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> |
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> scotthathcock@×××××××.net wrote: |
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> >I currently have an ASUS K8V Deluxe system with an 80GB SATA drive. It |
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> >used to have a old 10GB PATA disk for M$ dual boot. That disk died and |
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> >was interfering with boot, so it's in the trash. |
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> > |
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> >The dead disk reminded me of the pain I will suffer if I loose my linux |
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> >system. Even with backups of my home dir, which I'm not as good about as |
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> >I should be, a full fresh install would be a pain. Thus, I am |
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> >considering Raid. |
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> > |
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> >Does anyone have experience with RAID on this Board? |
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> >Is the Via or Promise controller better for this? |
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> >Is there a good Howto on migrating from a non Raid disk to Raid? I |
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> >recall seeing one but can't find it now. |
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> >Am I wasting time and money? Should I just do a better job of backup? Is |
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> >there a resource on what to backup to allow a fast regeneration (or |
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> >duplication) of an existing gentoo system? |
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> > |
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> >Finally, thanks for the great distribution. I use a commercial distro at |
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> >work and I am much happier with Gentoo. :) |
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> > |
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> >Scott |
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> -- |
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> gentoo-amd64@g.o mailing list |
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> |