Best hardware raid card out there?
- Thread starter drak3
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SATA/SCSI/SAS?
two 36GB 8MB raptors SATA I
but plan is to end up with 2x150GB 16MB soon if nothing better...
finally, the main reason for leaving the onboard raid (soft) and looking for a raidc ard (hard) is because of linux. The softraid idea is mainly build for windows and as such I will be better with a good raid card. But how about performance? card vs onboard (sitting on bus)
but plan is to end up with 2x150GB 16MB soon if nothing better...
finally, the main reason for leaving the onboard raid (soft) and looking for a raidc ard (hard) is because of linux. The softraid idea is mainly build for windows and as such I will be better with a good raid card. But how about performance? card vs onboard (sitting on bus)
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Soldato
Best hardware raid card I have come across are the Areca ones. They come in PCI-X and PCI-E flavours and kick serious butt. Offer Raid 0,1,5,6,Jbod and are faster than the best adaptec and LSI can offer.
Search for reviews and you will see what I mean.
Search for reviews and you will see what I mean.
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Performance depends entirely on the drivers (since its basically software RAID), your CPU and the width of the connection from the SATA chipset to the system bus. AFAIK modern onboard SATA RAID is usually connected via a single or two PCIe lane(s) rather than the PCI bus so bandwidth isn't usually a concern unless you have 4 HD's or more.
I'd expect performance to be almost identical between onboard RAID and a dedicated RAID card with up to 4 disks in most scenarios - certainly in what I've experienced.
As for Linux, most onboard RAID chipsets are supported via the dmraid utility, which creates Linux-style device-mapper (hence the 'dm' part) devices from the seperate disks which the low-level driver sees (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc). Running dmraid early in the boot stages (from initrd/initramfs) before the root filesystem is mounted allows you to use a Linux root filesystem, or LVM etc, on top of software onboard RAID. I've done this with 2-6 disks on nForce4, ICH5, ICH6 and ICH7 chipsets.
I'd expect performance to be almost identical between onboard RAID and a dedicated RAID card with up to 4 disks in most scenarios - certainly in what I've experienced.
As for Linux, most onboard RAID chipsets are supported via the dmraid utility, which creates Linux-style device-mapper (hence the 'dm' part) devices from the seperate disks which the low-level driver sees (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc). Running dmraid early in the boot stages (from initrd/initramfs) before the root filesystem is mounted allows you to use a Linux root filesystem, or LVM etc, on top of software onboard RAID. I've done this with 2-6 disks on nForce4, ICH5, ICH6 and ICH7 chipsets.
If you want a realy grate simple to use raid controller look no further than a 3ware card (3ware.com) they do PCI-X 64bit and PCI-E cards.
just put a 3ware 9590SE (SATA2) card into a file server running fedora6 and works like a dream, also linux kernel has support for all 3ware controllers now so no need to mess about with drivers on first boot etc. (only to update them later if needbe) also get a nice web interface for the 3ware if u run it on a headless server and are lazy like most of us
be aware of cheaper cards like LSI and highpoint they are not true hardware raid only software raid and you might as well try and mess about with the nforce onboard SATA raid software raid like the nfore onboard will use CPU to do all the work. which is no biggie if your system has plenty of CPU power to spare and you dont need to have every bit of CPU power to spare for any apps etc. if you want raid 0 or 1 then CPU will not be hit any ammount, if you want raid 5 then most deffuntly use a hardware card
hope helps
just put a 3ware 9590SE (SATA2) card into a file server running fedora6 and works like a dream, also linux kernel has support for all 3ware controllers now so no need to mess about with drivers on first boot etc. (only to update them later if needbe) also get a nice web interface for the 3ware if u run it on a headless server and are lazy like most of us
be aware of cheaper cards like LSI and highpoint they are not true hardware raid only software raid and you might as well try and mess about with the nforce onboard SATA raid software raid like the nfore onboard will use CPU to do all the work. which is no biggie if your system has plenty of CPU power to spare and you dont need to have every bit of CPU power to spare for any apps etc. if you want raid 0 or 1 then CPU will not be hit any ammount, if you want raid 5 then most deffuntly use a hardware card
hope helps