[KLUG Hardware] Re: SCSI card recommendation

[Bryan J. Smith]

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On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 10:59, Bruce Smith wrote:
> I'm having a hard time locating them.  Got any URL's?

Yes, very much so.  I'm looking for one myself.

> Sure, egg him on!  :-)

You know it!  ;-P

> I'm not sure I'd put one of these in a mission critical server, but=20
> it's a cheap way to do hardware RAID-0 or RAID-1 at my home.

3Ware works for production servers quite well -- as long as you
understand where it excels and how.  [ See my other post ]

> I wanted hardware mirroring and need a lot of disk space for KLUG
> ISO images.

And 3Ware works great for that.

I did some Bonnie-NFS benchmarks between a 3Ware 7800 (8-channel
UltraATA/100-133, 1MB SRAM, 64-bit) with 40GB 5,400rpm Maxtor disks and
an "aged" ICP-Vortex (2-channel Ultra80, i960-66 32-bit, 64MB) card with
36GB 10,000rpm IBM disks a year ago.  For 8KB NFS blocks, the 3Ware card
was far faster on the RAID-10 "system" volume and was usually victorious
at even random RAID-5 writes on the "data" volume.

I'd like to have a more "controlled setup" the next time I do it
though.  The way Linux schedules disk writes and how NFS serving works
on large, usually sequential blocks, 3Ware works quite well there too.=20
And I need large capacities, so ATA is much, much cheaper.  The only
kicker is that there isn't the standard "SFT" standard, but I usually
have 6-8 drives in the server box itself in 2-3 x3 removable sleds (x3
~$199/each).

> At the time I bought mine, I could buy 60GB IDE drives cheaper than 18GB
> SCSI drives, so the overall cost savings was considerable for a large
> amount of disk space.  Besides the 2 drive controller was only ~$100.

They've finally stopped shipping the Escalade 6410.  Damn I used to be
able to get that 4-channel card for $99 -- awesome deal.

Now they have the 7500/8500 (64-bit) series of 4, 8 and 12 channel
UltraATA/133 and SerialATA/150 cards, soon to be 16-port for the 8500
series.  The 4 and 8 port have 2MB of SRAM, the 12 and, planned, 16 port
have 4MB of SRAM.  At 4MB of SRAM, even lots of random RAID-5 writes can
be accommodated to a certain load.

Some vendors still carry the previous generation 7210 (1MB SRAM, 64-bit)
which is a 2-port UltraATA/100 (upgradeable to UltraATA/133 thanx to
on-board FPGAs) for just over $100.

> And it works fairly well, as long as it's plugged into a quality mobo.

Yes.  AMI BIOS sucks because of IRQ sharing issues.  On the ECS K7S5A,
as long as you plug the card into a PCI slot that is not sharing an IRQ,
you're okay.  If you don't, then the AMI BIOS just throws fits no matter
what OS you're using.

I have a Tyan S2460 (dual-Athlon) with 64-bit PCI slots.  The board is
sharing an IRQ and I'm having 0 issues.

--=20
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.            Contact Info:  http://thebs.org
A+/i-Net+/Linux+/Network+/Server+ CCNA CIWA CNA SCSA/SCWSE/SCNA
---------------------------------------------------------------
The more government chooses for you, the less freedom you have.

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