Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hi. Interesting - Someone else mentioned the same thing. The amr(4) manpage doesn't seem to be updated to mention the latest cards though. I did notice the driver hasn't been really updated in a while either. Wouldn't this cause a problem with identifying the newer cards? The authoritative source is the source itself: grep amr_device_ids /usr/src/sys/dev/amr/amr_pci.c -- ./lxnt ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Interesting - Someone else mentioned the same thing. The amr(4) manpage doesn't seem to be updated to mention the latest cards though. I did notice the driver hasn't been really updated in a while either. Wouldn't this cause a problem with identifying the newer cards? The authoritative source is the source itself: grep amr_device_ids /usr/src/sys/dev/amr/amr_pci.c True - But without having a card to check the ids, it doesn't help all that much. After a bunch of downloading WinXP drivers to look up vendor ids, it seems that the FreeBSD driver does not support any of the PCI Express boards (or Server boards) at this point in time. Jaime Bozza Qlinks Media Group ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
One thing I would like to see is a list of favoured non-raid multiport cards that are not dumb. We have a server running a rocket RAID controller (largely to get 8 ports of SATA). It doesn't do hot swap, it doesn't do SMART and I'm beginning to believe it might occasionally corrupt sectors (very occasionally). What I'd like to see is 4, 8 and 16 port JBOD controllers that work and are reasonably priced. I don't care about hardware RAID support (it is trivial to create systems that can boot from multiple disks with geom --- it's in the handbook). I don't care if they appear as SCSI or ATA disks I just want: 1) Hot swap 2) many ports 3) smartctl working ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On 2007-Feb-12 16:07:03 +1030, Daniel O'Connor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I regularly ship systems overseas where the power fails frequently. The inability to boot because one disk got hosed is Bad News (tm). A decent UPS can help here. It depends on your exact situation, I was just pointing out that SW RAID doesn't cover all the bases HW RAID does. If the disk is dead then the BIOS will skip it and the system should boot normally (I've tested this by pulling a disk since I didn't have a suitable dead disk to hand). A hard error in the 2nd stage boot loader, ficl or the kernel is definitely the worst case - I agree that this is very difficult for software raid to recover from. Note that even with hardware raid, there are still lots of failure points. The least reliable parts of a current computer are the CPU and PSU fans, not the disks. -- Peter Jeremy pgpMu4rg4CR3U.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On 2007-Feb-12 16:07:03 +1030, Daniel O'Connor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I regularly ship systems overseas where the power fails frequently. The inability to boot because one disk got hosed is Bad News (tm). A decent UPS can help here. No, i can't. I have seen UPS (even APC) fail in some cases. Computers got frozen. Also, i've seen many cases when power failes for more than 4 hours and nobody want to buy UPS which hold 4 hours of power for a dual xeon with 5 hdds. It depends on your exact situation, I was just pointing out that SW RAID doesn't cover all the bases HW RAID does. If the disk is dead then the BIOS will skip it and the system should boot normally (I've tested this by pulling a disk since I didn't have a suitable dead disk to hand). A hard error in the 2nd stage boot loader, ficl or the kernel is definitely the worst case - I agree that this is very difficult for software raid to recover from. No, BIOS does not always do it. If HDD REALLY fails (chips fried or something is really messy) the BIOS often just become frozen and never boots. I have seen it too. I've seen many things, you know :)) Note that even with hardware raid, there are still lots of failure points. The least reliable parts of a current computer are the CPU and PSU fans, not the disks. That is why RAID controller MUST be w/o fans and there must be MANY fans inside server case and there MUST constant temperature monitoring with SMS, EMAIL, ICQ messages on alarams. -- Artem ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 03:25:57PM -0600, Jaime Bozza wrote: I want to second the recommendation for Areca controllers. We have two systems - The first is using an 1160 (16-port PCI-x) with 16 400GB drives, the 2nd is using the newer 1261ML card (16 port PCI Express, mini SAS connectors) with 16 500GB drives. Comments below: Jaime, can you expand a bit about what sort-of motherboard you installed the 1261ML in? I've yet to find any mainstream motherboards which have a PCIe x8 slot. Most have x1, some have x4, and many have x16. I've seen one Supermicro board which has a x8 slot but is only wired for x4 (has 4 lanes). Based on what I've read, you can install a x8 card in a x16 slot as long as the x16 slot is wired (physically) for 8 or more lanes. My concern is that these x16 slots on motherboards are being primarily used for video cards, thus I ultimately have no idea what the manufacturers are testing them with. Most manufacturer documentation I've seen says for use with graphics applications. I'll add that I've only seen x1 and x16 cards until now -- the Areca cards are the first card I've seen using x8. Thoughts/comments? -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networkinghttp://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Jaime, can you expand a bit about what sort-of motherboard you installed the 1261ML in? I've yet to find any mainstream motherboards which have a PCIe x8 slot. Most have x1, some have x4, and many have x16. I've seen one Supermicro board which has a x8 slot but is only wired for x4 (has 4 lanes). I'm using a Supermicro X7DVL-E board, which has 1 PCI-e x8 and 1 PCI-e x4 (in an x8 slot). Based on what I've read, you can install a x8 card in a x16 slot as long as the x16 slot is wired (physically) for 8 or more lanes. You probably could, but I'm not sure that would work correctly in a non-server board. I think any server board that has a x16 slot would be fine since more servers aren't really designed for using high-end graphics. My concern is that these x16 slots on motherboards are being primarily used for video cards, thus I ultimately have no idea what the manufacturers are testing them with. Most manufacturer documentation I've seen says for use with graphics applications. I'll add that I've only seen x1 and x16 cards until now -- the Areca cards are the first card I've seen using x8. Looking at Supermicro's site, it seems that pretty much all of the 5000V and 5000P based motherboards have at least one x8 slot. The 5000X based boards have an x16 slot, but those are workstation boards which would likely use that slot for a graphics card. Look at Supermicro's site under Xeon 5300/5100/5000 motherboards. You should be able to find a board that would work just fine for you. Jaime Bozza Qlinks Media Group ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 12:11:42PM +0300, Artem Kuchin wrote: On 2007-Feb-12 16:07:03 +1030, Daniel O'Connor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I regularly ship systems overseas where the power fails frequently. The inability to boot because one disk got hosed is Bad News (tm). A decent UPS can help here. No, i can't. I have seen UPS (even APC) fail in some cases. Computers got frozen. Also, i've seen many cases when power failes for more than 4 hours and nobody want to buy UPS which hold 4 hours of power for a dual xeon with 5 hdds. sysutils/nut is a good work-around for this. --Geoff ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hello! On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 06:15:53PM +0300, Artem Kuchin wrote: Under gmirror OS must issue two commands to write to disks and some commands to check/set mark that mirrored data is intact. Under hardware RAID OS issue sonly one command to write and no checking command, since raid controller handles this async. So, software OS raid must be slower than controller based raid anyway. Yes. The OS has got to do a bit more work that is otherwise done by the CPU on the RAID controller. For modern CPUs this extra work is measurably neglegible. One guy that I happen to know, who was responsible for the database backend servers of Germany's biggest web mail provider at the time, ran extensive benchmarks. Result: for RAID 1, RAID 0 and RAID 1+0 there is no difference in hardware RAID vs. OS mirroring and striping. He used Linux, but I'd bet a huge amount that his findings can be transferred to arbitrary current operating systems. RAID 5 and RAID 6 are different beasts alltogether, but you do not want RAID 5 for transaction heavy systems, anyway. When you are running a huge DB that is not read mostly, you want to have your working set in memory. If the database needs to write to disk, eventually, it's all about latency. And latency on RAID 5 is horrendous, regardless if implemented in hardware RAID or not. Kind regards, Patrick -- punkt.de GmbH * Vorholzstr. 25 * 76137 Karlsruhe Tel. 0721 9109 0 * Fax 0721 9109 100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.punkt.de Gf: Jürgen Egeling AG Mannheim 108285 ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
In mpc.lists.freebsd.stable, you wrote: : For modern CPUs this extra work is measurably neglegible. With all of the interrupt activity it seems counterintuitive that it would be negligible in that the processor is incurring many extra cache faults to service the controller. ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Monday 12 February 2007 00:34, Patrick M. Hausen wrote: One guy that I happen to know, who was responsible for the database backend servers of Germany's biggest web mail provider at the time, ran extensive benchmarks. Result: for RAID 1, RAID 0 and RAID 1+0 there is no difference in hardware RAID vs. OS mirroring and striping. He used Linux, but I'd bet a huge amount that his findings can be transferred to arbitrary current operating systems. Software RAID won't help you if your primary disk gets an error in, say, the second stage loader. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C pgpUoo0cmQXSe.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hi, all! On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 09:40:18AM +1030, Daniel O'Connor wrote: On Monday 12 February 2007 00:34, Patrick M. Hausen wrote: One guy that I happen to know, who was responsible for the database backend servers of Germany's biggest web mail provider at the time, ran extensive benchmarks. Result: for RAID 1, RAID 0 and RAID 1+0 there is no difference in hardware RAID vs. OS mirroring and striping. He used Linux, but I'd bet a huge amount that his findings can be transferred to arbitrary current operating systems. Software RAID won't help you if your primary disk gets an error in, say, the second stage loader. I don't really buy this booting arguement. What's the failure scenario here? If the system is up and running, it will just keep humming along. The SCSI or ATA layer is supposed to detach a failed drive and geom will disable one part of the mirror. You can react appropriately when you get the failure message. Regards, Patrick -- punkt.de GmbH * Vorholzstr. 25 * 76137 Karlsruhe Tel. 0721 9109 0 * Fax 0721 9109 100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.punkt.de Gf: Jürgen Egeling AG Mannheim 108285 ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Monday 12 February 2007 10:21, Patrick M. Hausen wrote: Software RAID won't help you if your primary disk gets an error in, say, the second stage loader. I don't really buy this booting arguement. What's the failure scenario here? If the system is up and running, it will just keep humming along. The SCSI or ATA layer is supposed to detach a failed drive and geom will disable one part of the mirror. You can react appropriately when you get the failure message. Sure, if you're present. I regularly ship systems overseas where the power fails frequently. The inability to boot because one disk got hosed is Bad News (tm). It depends on your exact situation, I was just pointing out that SW RAID doesn't cover all the bases HW RAID does. Murphy dictates that the moment one of your disks down your system will glitch/panic/etc and reboot and then you'll be stuffed :) -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C pgpqYtKYMRj3q.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
hi! I am the original poster of this thread. I have read many interesting reply during these two days. However, as i said in the original message due to certification issues i am pretty limited to INTEL controllers and i have not seen a single relevant reply about them. This is interesting. Nobody uses Intel controllers on FreeBSD or they just suck that much? -- Artem ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Artem Kuchin wrote: hi! I am the original poster of this thread. I have read many interesting reply during these two days. However, as i said in the original message due to certification issues i am pretty limited to INTEL controllers and i have not seen a single relevant reply about them. This is interesting. Nobody uses Intel controllers on FreeBSD or they just suck that much? If you have enough SATA ports and no need for fancy RAID levels, then my advice is to use gmirror. Hardware RAID1 buys you nothing in perfomance and reliability for a prolonged headache with drivers, bios insanity and monitoring+control tools. -- ./lxnt ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hardware RAID1 buys you nothing in perfomance and reliability for a prolonged headache with drivers, bios insanity and monitoring+control tools. Intel does seem to have a few hardware-based RAID controllers here: http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid/ I don't see any driver or support for them in FreeBSD though. Jaime Bozza Qlinks Media Group ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Jaime Bozza wrote: Hardware RAID1 buys you nothing in perfomance and reliability for a prolonged headache with drivers, bios insanity and monitoring+control tools. Intel does seem to have a few hardware-based RAID controllers here: http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid/ I don't see any driver or support for them in FreeBSD though. Those are rebranded LSI Megaraid units, amr(4). They have mostly-unusable GUI bios (you actually have to have a mouse plugged in to do anything with it), no up-to-date FreeBSD control utility, though some reverse-engineering work resulted in a simple monitoring utility. They work ok (SCSI ones at least), but configuration and maintenance leave much to be desired. -- ./lxnt ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
- Original Message - From: Artem Kuchin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 5:15 PM Subject: Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd? Alexander Sabourenkov wrote: Artem Kuchin wrote: hi! I am the original poster of this thread. I have read many interesting reply during these two days. However, as i said in the original message due to certification issues i am pretty limited to INTEL controllers and i have not seen a single relevant reply about them. This is interesting. Nobody uses Intel controllers on FreeBSD or they just suck that much? If you have enough SATA ports and no need for fancy RAID levels, then my advice is to use gmirror. Hardware RAID1 buys you nothing in perfomance and reliability for a prolonged headache with drivers, bios insanity and monitoring+control tools. Hm... two points here. I, somehow, do not really believe that software raid (gmirror for example) is as reliable as hardware. I, deeply inside, believe that i might screw things very badly under some heavy load and bad timing conditions. Can't explain it. it is religious i guess, but i can be very wrong about this. However, two perfomance point: Under gmirror OS must issue two commands to write to disks and some commands to check/set mark that mirrored data is intact. Under hardware RAID OS issue sonly one command to write and no checking command, since raid controller handles this async. So, software OS raid must be slower than controller based raid anyway. Am i right here? Any benchmark data on this? As for reliability of gmirror. I just need to know how it works to see for myself that if power turned off in some racing condition gmirror will know that disk are out of sync. If it is done than gmirror must check sync of disks every read, and that mean two command for reading too, which must slow down things. Is it true? -- Artem I set up 3 RedHat Enterprise servers in a cluster for a customer 2-3 years ago. Dual P4-XEON 3.4GHz with 16G of ram each. Really lovely servers. Intel server motherboards with 2 x15k RPM SCSI drives as a mirror for the OS and fibrechannel external storage for Oracle 10i. The SCSI RAID on the motherboard was horrifically slow. I'm talking around 5MB/s hardware raid for 15k RPM SCSI drives. Turns out it was a known bug on the Intel motherboards with no workaround or fix so I set the boxes up with Linux software raid. The performance was excellent and they are still running perfectly today. I think the SCSI controller was Symbios or something like that. Ever since then I have not trusted Intel and RAID in the same sentence. I was really upset that they were not interested in fixing the issue. I even emailed Intel to ask them about it and they said there was not much likelihood of a fix. Call me biased but that's just what my experience has taught me. Btw the Areca cards have Intel RISC CPU's on them and they are lightning fast. -Clay ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Friday 09 February 2007 09:15, Artem Kuchin wrote: Alexander Sabourenkov wrote: Artem Kuchin wrote: hi! I am the original poster of this thread. I have read many interesting reply during these two days. However, as i said in the original message due to certification issues i am pretty limited to INTEL controllers and i have not seen a single relevant reply about them. This is interesting. Nobody uses Intel controllers on FreeBSD or they just suck that much? If you have enough SATA ports and no need for fancy RAID levels, then my advice is to use gmirror. Hardware RAID1 buys you nothing in perfomance and reliability for a prolonged headache with drivers, bios insanity and monitoring+control tools. Hm... two points here. I, somehow, do not really believe that software raid (gmirror for example) is as reliable as hardware. I, deeply inside, believe that i might screw things very badly under some heavy load and bad timing conditions. Can't explain it. it is religious i guess, but i can be very wrong about this. However, two perfomance point: Under gmirror OS must issue two commands to write to disks and some commands to check/set mark that mirrored data is intact. Under hardware RAID OS issue sonly one command to write and no checking command, since raid controller handles this async. So, software OS raid must be slower than controller based raid anyway. Am i right here? Any benchmark data on this? As for reliability of gmirror. I just need to know how it works to see for myself that if power turned off in some racing condition gmirror will know that disk are out of sync. If it is done than gmirror must check sync of disks every read, and that mean two command for reading too, which must slow down things. Is it true? -- Artem What hardware RAID buys you over gmirror is that you can boot from it. If a drive in the mirror fails the device name available to the OS is still the same. The FreeBSD loader does not do gmirror, it boots off the raw device, and then gmirror is loaded. If the drive you are booting off of fails you have to have the BIOS set to boot from the other drive in the mirror, and then you run into 'what is the root device set to in loader.conf' issues. From a raw speed perspective on an unloaded CPU a 3.0ghz processor is probably just as fast or faster than the embedded processor on a RAID card running at a few hundred mhz. Sure, once you start talking about CPUs at full load there are advantages to off-loading stuff to a dedicated processor. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Josh Paetzel wrote: What hardware RAID buys you over gmirror is that you can boot from it. [snip] From a raw speed perspective on an unloaded CPU a 3.0ghz processor is probably just as fast or faster than the embedded processor on a RAID card running at a few hundred mhz. Sure, once you start talking about CPUs at full load there are advantages to off-loading stuff to a dedicated processor. What hardware RAID buys me over gmirror is that SATA2 NCQ actually works on recent hardware RAID cards, and doesn't on gmirror -- at least according to the ata(4) manpage on 6.2-RELEASE. Depending on your specific application, that could have a performance impact, no? -- Mike Andrews * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://www.bit0.com It's not news, it's Fark.com. Carpe cavy! ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hello, Artem Kuchin wrote: Hello! I need a raid controller for FBSD 6.2 which has the following options 1) Full SATA-II support 2) Good rperfomance (over 50MB read, over 30 write) in mirror mode 3) No weird problems with freebSD (like with SRCS16) 4) Utility to monitor status of raids (command line or web) 5) Utility to rebuild, repair, manager arrays in OS 6) Preferably Intel I'm very happy with ARECA ARC1110. ARECA also provide cli tool for freebsd on their site. I'm using it in RAID 10 configuration and here are few benchmark results that I run on production server ;) *bonnie++ -d /var/tmp -u root -s 16g -n 256:65536:65536:16 Version 1.93c* Version 1.93c --Sequential Output-- --Sequential Input- --Random- Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- MachineSize K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP blah.cmotd.com 16G 159 88 54264 24 24727 12 299 94 70744 19 223.5 12 Latency 63581us 803ms1123ms 93936us 94991us 251ms Version 1.93c --Sequential Create-- Random Create blah.cmotd.com -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- files:max:min/sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP 256:65536:65536/16 715 24 826 25 17321 49 733 2451 2 6039 70 Latency 1220ms 408ms2805ms1189ms 692ms 2735ms *./bonnie++ -d /mnt/mblogs -u root -s 16g -n 256:65536:65536:16 - Version 1.03* Version 1.03 --Sequential Output-- --Sequential Input- --Random- -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- MachineSize K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP blah.cmotd.com 16G 54953 57 56950 21 24375 10 48757 49 70351 17 202.5 1 --Sequential Create-- Random Create -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- files:max:min/sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP 256:65536:65536/16 723 20 909 17 20905 41 756 2151 2 6528 74 FreeBSD blah.XXX 6.2-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.2-PRERELEASE #3: Tue Oct 10 13:28:56 CEST 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/CORE-SMP i386 I know, 3ware has such good stuff, but those controller are not certified for internet services in here (russia). So, i am pretty much limited to Intel controllers. Is there intel controller which satisfied all the 1-6 conditions? I only need mirroring. -- С уважением, Артем Кучин ООО Ай Ти Легион www.itlegion.ru +7 (495) 232-0338 ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Best Wishes, Stefan Lambrev ICQ# 24134177 ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hello, Artem Kuchin wrote: Hello! I need a raid controller for FBSD 6.2 which has the following options 1) Full SATA-II support 2) Good rperfomance (over 50MB read, over 30 write) in mirror mode 3) No weird problems with freebSD (like with SRCS16) 4) Utility to monitor status of raids (command line or web) 5) Utility to rebuild, repair, manager arrays in OS 6) Preferably Intel I'm very happy with ARECA ARC1110. ARECA also provide cli tool for freebsd on their site. I'm using it in RAID 10 configuration and here are few benchmark results that I run on production server ;) *bonnie++ -d /var/tmp -u root -s 16g -n 256:65536:65536:16 Version 1.93c* Version 1.93c --Sequential Output-- --Sequential Input- --Random- Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- MachineSize K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP blah.cmotd.com 16G 159 88 54264 24 24727 12 299 94 70744 19 223.5 12 Latency 63581us 803ms1123ms 93936us 94991us 251ms Version 1.93c --Sequential Create-- Random Create blah.cmotd.com -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- files:max:min/sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP 256:65536:65536/16 715 24 826 25 17321 49 733 2451 2 6039 70 Latency 1220ms 408ms2805ms1189ms 692ms 2735ms *./bonnie++ -d /mnt/mblogs -u root -s 16g -n 256:65536:65536:16 - Version 1.03* Version 1.03 --Sequential Output-- --Sequential Input- --Random- -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- MachineSize K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP blah.cmotd.com 16G 54953 57 56950 21 24375 10 48757 49 70351 17 202.5 1 --Sequential Create-- Random Create -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- files:max:min/sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP /sec %CP 256:65536:65536/16 723 20 909 17 20905 41 756 2151 2 6528 74 FreeBSD blah.XXX 6.2-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.2-PRERELEASE #3: Tue Oct 10 13:28:56 CEST 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/CORE-SMP i386 I know, 3ware has such good stuff, but those controller are not certified for internet services in here (russia). So, i am pretty much limited to Intel controllers. Is there intel controller which satisfied all the 1-6 conditions? I only need mirroring. -- С уважением, Артем Кучин ООО Ай Ти Легион www.itlegion.ru +7 (495) 232-0338 I'll second Stefan with the Areca. I have an Areca 1120 8 port SATA2 controller. It hasn't given me an ounce of issues. It's got a nice CLI and web based interface as well as being SNMP manageable. Been running mine for 2 years without any issues at all. It also supports nifty things like online volume expansion and hot-swapping (if you have the hot-swap SATA drive bays) -Clay ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hi, On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 12:42:39PM +0300, Artem Kuchin wrote: I need a raid controller for FBSD 6.2 which has the following options I can highly recommend the Areca family of SATA-II controllers. I have a ARC-1110 (4 poort RAID controller) with 4x 320GB Western Digital SATA-II drives attached to it in a RAID5 configuration. Simple dd(1)-ing gives around 100MB/sec read and 70MB/sec write performance. You can use sysutils/areca-cli to monitor it and update settings (I have never tried actually creating arrays there though). The controllers are a tad expensive, but once you have one, you won't reget it. Regards, -- Rink P.W. Springer- http://rink.nu It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But yet a far more terrible thing, to admit it.- Darth Traya smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Hi, On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 12:42:39PM +0300, Artem Kuchin wrote: I need a raid controller for FBSD 6.2 which has the following options I can highly recommend the Areca family of SATA-II controllers. I have a ARC-1110 (4 poort RAID controller) with 4x 320GB Western Digital SATA-II drives attached to it in a RAID5 configuration. Simple dd(1)-ing gives around 100MB/sec read and 70MB/sec write performance. You can use sysutils/areca-cli to monitor it and update settings (I have never tried actually creating arrays there though). The controllers are a tad expensive, but once you have one, you won't reget it. Regards, -- Rink P.W. Springer- http://rink.nu It is such a quiet thing, to fall. But yet a far more terrible thing, to admit it.- Darth Traya I have 2 arryas of 4 WD320G drives each running RAID0 (I have backups I just need the speed). [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/nas # dd if=/dev/zero of=test.file bs=65536 count=16384 16384+0 records in 16384+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 7.314186 secs (146802639 bytes/sec) -Clay ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
http://www.3ware.com/ 2007/2/8, Jeremy Chadwick [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 12:47:10PM +0200, Clayton Milos wrote: I can highly recommend the Areca family of SATA-II controllers. I have a ARC-1110 (4 poort RAID controller) with 4x 320GB Western Digital SATA-II drives attached to it in a RAID5 configuration. I have questions: 1) Do these controllers, from a BIOS level, permit SMART commands to be sent directly to the drives (via pass(4)) so you can monitor drives for potential upcoming failures and perform drive tests, via smartctl? 2) Regardless of performance, have you actually tried a hard failure with these controllers and seen what both the controller and the OS do? A good example is to pull the SATA power plug out of one of the drives in the array while it's powered on and see what happens, both from a controller perspective and what FreeBSD does. The same question applies to hot-swapping. 3) Does Areca provide any form of carriage/enclosure medium, such as an enclosure which supports 4 drives, allows hot-swapping, and allows you to query the enclosure for statistics (fan RPM, thermals, and so on)? 4) string'ing the cli32 binary returns some references to SMART, but the monitoring is generally retarded (literally, not slang) -- it looks as if it just wants to use SMART to say drive bad or drive good. This is not an effective use of SMART, and does nothing for those wanting to monitor drives properly (read: temperature, excessive ECC, perform SMART tests for bad blocks, etc.). 5) Is there native FreeBSD 6.x binaries for administrative utilities? It doesn't look like it, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong utility: ~/V1.5_50930 $ file cli32 cli32: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, for FreeBSD 4.2, statically linked, not stripped Many controllers (including Adaptec) these days suffer from some or all of the above issues, too. Ultimately this turns me off to using any form of RAID controller; vendors who refuse to give full documentation for their hardware to engineers who want to write drivers for it, refuse to implement proper passthrough methods (I'm looking at you, Adaptec) so that you can talk to the drives directly if need be, nor provide you with any form of useful FreeBSD support (here's our old crusty 3.x a.out binaries built by a guy who left the company 7 years ago! Thanks for buying company, bye!) The best out of the bunch in this regards seems to be Promise, who despite having ehhh controllers, has given Soren lots of documen- tation and has been helpful in providing him answers to his questions. I can't say the same for other controller vendors. I'm sorry if I sound bitter, but I must have gone through 4 different brands of SATA RAID controllers before saying screw this and going with non-RAID or using geom. I don't have anything against Areca (I've never used their hardware), but I have no desire to use hardware which does not support the above things -- which in 2007 should be standard by all means. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networkinghttp://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Thursday 08 February 2007 08:52 am, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 12:47:10PM +0200, Clayton Milos wrote: I can highly recommend the Areca family of SATA-II controllers. I have a ARC-1110 (4 poort RAID controller) with 4x 320GB Western Digital SATA-II drives attached to it in a RAID5 configuration. The following is from my experience with 3Ware Escalade RAID controllers (7506-4LP, 9500S-8, 9550SX-8. 9550SX-12 single and multi-lane). I have questions: 1) Do these controllers, from a BIOS level, permit SMART commands to be sent directly to the drives (via pass(4)) so you can monitor drives for potential upcoming failures and perform drive tests, via smartctl? Don't know, never checked. 2) Regardless of performance, have you actually tried a hard failure with these controllers and seen what both the controller and the OS do? A good example is to pull the SATA power plug out of one of the drives in the array while it's powered on and see what happens, both from a controller perspective and what FreeBSD does. The same question applies to hot-swapping. Pulling the plug on a drive running on FreeBSD 5.2.1, 5.3, and 6.0 didn't phase the OS. A message was logged to the console and /var/log/messages that the array was degraded, an e-mail was sent to my account and my phone that the array was degraded, and everything continued merrily on. We ran the test server for three weeks with one drive disconnected. Couldn't really notice any performance lags in normal use (it was a mail filtering gateway box running Postfix, MySQL, Amavisd-new, and ClamAV). When we plugged the drive back in, a message was logged (and send via e-mail) that a new drive was found, and a rebuild was underway. Took three or four days to rebuild the array during normal usage, and performance did take a hit during this time. After the rebuild completed, another message was logged and an e-mail sent saying everything was back to normal. 3) Does Areca provide any form of carriage/enclosure medium, such as an enclosure which supports 4 drives, allows hot-swapping, and allows you to query the enclosure for statistics (fan RPM, thermals, and so on)? Don't have any experience with actual enclosures (with fans and thermals - at least not for monitoring purposes) but the 3Ware cards work well in hot-swappable drive bays in our 2U, 4U, and 5U rackmounts. 5) Is there native FreeBSD 6.x binaries for administrative utilities? It doesn't look like it, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong utility: ~/V1.5_50930 $ file cli32 cli32: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, for FreeBSD 4.2, statically linked, not stripped Don't know about the ARECA but the 3Ware cli is a FreeBSD native binary (don't have any FreeBSD boxes with 3Ware cards at the moment to run file on - they're all Debian Etch now), although we used the web GUI for everything (3dm2). -- Freddie Cash [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
They kick ass is what they are like. :) I had a 3U box with a 12 port controller sitting next to my desk for a few weeks and my only goal was to confuse/break the 3Ware controller. No amount of power plug pulling, pulling multiple drives, quickly re-arranging drives could confuse the controller. Made the SCSI stuff we use look like absolute neurotic junk. Forgot that note - Areca handles drive location changes the same way. I assume this is handled by metadata on the drive. -They added a moving part (2-wire fan, no tach) to a mission-critical part. That seems real stupid. After the bearings die in 2-3 years, what happens to your card? Does it melt or just start acting weird? If the engineers didn't consider that, what other failure modes did their limited creativity miss? :) Strange. Our 1160 has a fan, but also had just a heatsink (no fan) that was in the box. My 1261ML was heatsink only. I believe someone asked for the feature. Both controllers monitor the fan and would notify you if the fan died. You can turn the option on or off (off by default) if you need to. -Availability. None of our normal dealers could get them. Availability seems to be a bit better now, but I can't answer for your dealers. -Not many people seemed to be using them, so less feedback available and the whole package (hardware/firmware/driver) has less exposure than 3Ware. While the 9xxx series seem to be great (use a different driver), the twe cards caused me so much grief that I was afraid to try them out. We had a bunch of corruption issues (in RAID 5) with our 75xx controllers that I was never able to fix. RAID 0 or 1 seems to work just fine for them. -3Ware answered pre-sales questions, Areca didn't. Perhaps they've changed? I spent a good hour on the phone with a tech before we purchased our first controller. This was last year sometime. Performance and feature-wise the Areca and 3Ware seemed pretty close, so we went with 3Ware. Everyone has their reasons - I liked the RAID 6 feature, plus the OOB management of Areca, plus my history with 3ware wasn't good. :( Jaime Bozza Qlinks Media Group ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
I want to second the recommendation for Areca controllers. We have two systems - The first is using an 1160 (16-port PCI-x) with 16 400GB drives, the 2nd is using the newer 1261ML card (16 port PCI Express, mini SAS connectors) with 16 500GB drives. Comments below: 1) Do these controllers, from a BIOS level, permit SMART commands to be sent directly to the drives (via pass(4)) so you can monitor drives for potential upcoming failures and perform drive tests, via smartctl? The cli32 will give you smart attributes, but no testing when the drive is part of a RaidSet. The controllers do support passthrough with JBOD. See below for more information. 2) Regardless of performance, have you actually tried a hard failure with these controllers and seen what both the controller and the OS do? A good example is to pull the SATA power plug out of one of the drives in the array while it's powered on and see what happens, both from a controller perspective and what FreeBSD does. The same question applies to hot-swapping. Both our systems are using RAID 6, and I've tested them thoroughly. I've pulled one drive out, OS didn't really care. The 16-port cards have their own Ethernet interface which will send emails for any events. Put the drive back in and the controllers just automatically start rebuilding. While I was rebuilding, I pulled a different drive. Again - FreeBSD happily went on. Put the drive back in and the controllers would rebuild the 2nd drive after done with the first. During all this, FreeBSD could do anything it wanted with the array. I then dropped power to the entire system. Coming back on, it would start rebuilding once FreeBSD started to load (the controller needs to have an OS Driver loaded before it starts to rebuild, or you need to go into the BIOS utility to process the rebuild in the foreground). Booting, fsck, or anything else would work just fine while the system was rebuilding. You can set the background processing to be 5%, 20%, 50%, or 80%. Obviously, 80% will be quicker but slow down access to the system. I didn't feel that it slowed down TOO much, but that is a matter of opinion. Setting it to 5% or 20% should have little or no change in performance. 3) Does Areca provide any form of carriage/enclosure medium, such as an enclosure which supports 4 drives, allows hot-swapping, and allows you to query the enclosure for statistics (fan RPM, thermals, and so on)? Areca supports individual HD Activity/Failure connections and the I2C standard. I don't believe Areca has its own external drive cage, but it'll work with many others. I'm not sure about drive cage thermals or fans, but it monitors everything about the drives. We handle case thermals via the motherboard. The controllers we have do not have any external connectors, so it would all be internal. 4) string'ing the cli32 binary returns some references to SMART, but the monitoring is generally retarded (literally, not slang) -- it looks as if it just wants to use SMART to say drive bad or drive good. This is not an effective use of SMART, and does nothing for those wanting to monitor drives properly (read: temperature, excessive ECC, perform SMART tests for bad blocks, etc.). In RAID mode, I don't think it allows you to test each drive directly. It'll monitor the SMART attributes and generate warnings (for instance, if a drive gets too hot), or if there are other problems. If you're looking at using the controller in JBOD mode, or a drive in JBOD mode, you can create a passthrough, which I would assume would allow you direct access, but I haven't tested that. 5) Is there native FreeBSD 6.x binaries for administrative utilities? It doesn't look like it, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong utility: ~/V1.5_50930 $ file cli32 cli32: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, for FreeBSD 4.2, statically linked, not stripped While the utility may be 4.2, it's statically linked, so it works fine on any later version (of FreeBSD) I've tested. I'm sorry if I sound bitter, but I must have gone through 4 different brands of SATA RAID controllers before saying screw this and going with non-RAID or using geom. I don't have anything against Areca (I've never used their hardware), but I have no desire to use hardware which does not support the above things -- which in 2007 should be standard by all means. The only thing that the Areca cards may not give you is the ability to run SMART tests on a drive. I think the idea is that Areca just monitors the drive and if the drive reports any sort of stability, it takes the drive offline and notifies you. In a case like that, I would be more inclined to pull the drive, replace it with a new one, and run my tests on the old (possibly bad) drive outside the RAID array. IMHO, I don't want to take chances testing a drive and having the array in a degraded state. Another possibility
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
Jaime Bozza wrote: Everyone has their reasons - I liked the RAID 6 feature, plus the OOB management of Areca, plus my history with 3ware wasn't good. :( For what it's worth, 3Ware's latest PCI-E cards (9650 series) now support RAID 6. The updated twa driver that supports them hasn't yet been merged into FreeBSD (see kern/106488 which I filed 2 months ago) but you can download either the source or the binary for it from 3Ware that works just fine. The updated 3dm2 for it did make it into the Ports tree. Driver annoyances aside, my 9650SE is considerably faster than my 9500S (both have batteries, both have the drive's write cache off), especially on writes, and they are both much faster than my Adaptec 2410SA (which has no battery option and thus needed write caching disabled). Despite not being a fan of the 2410SA, I'm pretty happy with the SCSI version (2120S) which uses the exact same FreeBSD driver. Part of that is the SCSI version has a battery option so write speeds don't suck, where the SATA version doesn't. Or at least that specific model of SATA card doesn't. I'm less of a fan of the older asr-based 2110S... but the one we have still works as long as we keep it in a 32-bit non-PAE box. I've never tried Areca. I would probably like them, from the sound of things. I'm sticking with 3Ware for SATA systems for now though... but hey, personal preference and all. For my next SCSI/SAS system I may have to do some serious evaluation of what's new out there... -- Mike Andrews * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://www.bit0.com It's not news, it's Fark.com. Carpe cavy! ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 02:51:58PM -0800, Freddie Cash wrote: On Thursday 08 February 2007 02:17 pm, Mike Andrews wrote: Jaime Bozza wrote: Everyone has their reasons - I liked the RAID 6 feature, plus the OOB management of Areca, plus my history with 3ware wasn't good. :( For what it's worth, 3Ware's latest PCI-E cards (9650 series) now support RAID 6. The updated twa driver that supports them hasn't yet been merged into FreeBSD (see kern/106488 which I filed 2 months ago) but you can download either the source or the binary for it from 3Ware that works just fine. The updated 3dm2 for it did make it into the Ports tree. Driver annoyances aside, my 9650SE is considerably faster than my 9500S Not all that surprising, since the 9500-series use PATA-133 chipsets with SATA-PATA bridges, and the 9550+ uses a native 3G SATA chipset. Even though the 9500s are listed as 1.5G SATA parts, you'll never get better than ATA-133 speeds out of them. Which is quite irrelevant since there are no SATA-disks which actually can use more speed than that. (The fastest SATA-disks currently available -- Western Digital's Raptor series has a maximum transfer rate of just under 90 MB/s. Most disks are significantly slower than that.) The 133 MB/s one can get out of ATA-133 is quite enough for that (and not all that much less than the 150MB/s that normal SATA provides. (Some SATA devices also provide a 300MB/s transfer speed, but since no disks can keep up with that it does not make all that much of a difference in practice.)) Just about all reviews that have compared both controllers and disks with and without SATA-PATA bridges have come to the conclusion that those bridges do not cause any measurable drop in performance over their native-SATA counterparts. The only real drawback with using SATA-PATA bridges is that you cannot get support for the optional SATA features like NCQ. (But not all native-SATA solutions support those features either.) We didn't realise that when we ordered our first pair of Escalade 9500S 4-port cards. Thankfully, just after they arrived and before we put in the mass-order, the 9550SX was released and we've standardised on them. The 9550SX should be a bit faster than the 9500S and the 9650SE faster still, but that is for other reasons. (Faster processor for handling the parity calculations for RAID-5, faster memory on the card, being able to do more operations in parallell, etc.) -- Insert your favourite quote here. Erik Trulsson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 04:34:57PM -0500, Charles Sprickman wrote: -They added a moving part (2-wire fan, no tach) to a mission-critical part. That seems real stupid. After the bearings die in 2-3 years, what happens to your card? Does it melt or just start acting weird? If the engineers didn't consider that, what other failure modes did their limited creativity miss? :) The fan does have a tachometer which you can monitor from the card BIOS or using the cli binary. You can also disable the tachometer so you can swap the heatsink+fan for the larger heatsink (w/o fan) that comes in the box. You can find all of this out by *gasp* reading the manual. --Geoff ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
For what it's worth, 3Ware's latest PCI-E cards (9650 series) now support RAID 6. The updated twa driver that supports them hasn't yet been merged into FreeBSD (see kern/106488 which I filed 2 months ago) but you can download either the source or the binary for it from 3Ware that works just fine. The updated 3dm2 for it did make it into the Ports tree. I noticed that when I was making my reply from earlier. At some point in time I may test out the newer (twa-based) cards. It seems that 3ware is actually interested in supporting those. They never managed to get the twe driver out of what they called beta, so that's where my experience ended. Interesting thing - When I installed FreeBSD on the new system (pre-6.2 version discs) it didn't see the new Areca card. I started to get worried but quickly found out that the driver had been updated shortly before 6.2 was released. Quick update and all was well. So the kernel driver *is* being updated. Driver annoyances aside, my 9650SE is considerably faster than my 9500S (both have batteries, both have the drive's write cache off), especially on writes, and they are both much faster than my Adaptec 2410SA (which has no battery option and thus needed write caching disabled). I haven't tested the current system in speeds, but it's noticeably faster than my other (1160 PCI-X) system. Possibly due to the fact that I was using WD4000YR drives in the first which do not support the updated speeds of SATA2. The current system does and the card detects it. The newer card also has an updated processor - Intel IOP341 instead of an IOP33x series processor which I would guess makes a big difference. At least according to synthetic benchmarks going around the net. :) I've never tried Areca. I would probably like them, from the sound of things. I'm sticking with 3Ware for SATA systems for now though... but hey, personal preference and all. For my next SCSI/SAS system I may have to do some serious evaluation of what's new out there... Regardless of what you choose, there are a few decent options for FreeBSD now. Shows that people out there are actually starting to care about FreeBSD for some of these controllers. Unfortunately, I didn't have the same solid results with the mirroring (RAID1) support for onboard SATA (Supermicro X7DVL-E). I mirrored two SATA2 drives (OS) and tried pulling one drive. Placing it back in didn't automatically start a rebuild, but I could force it. Pulling it, restarting, and then removing the drive from the RAID1 array (via the BIOS) would then cause FreeBSD to panic at boot (or drive insertion) every time. I don't know if it was the fact that there was still metadata on the drive so the ataraid driver thought something differently, but it bothered me a little. I had to disable ATA RAID in the BIOS completely (and remove the ataraid device from the kernel) to get FreeBSD to boot or allow the drive back into the system at all. Since the motherboard RAID is just software RAID, I switched over to gmirror but kept AHCI on so I'd still have hotplug support. After that I wasn't able to kill the system. Jaime Bozza Qlinks Media Group ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What is a good choice of sata-ii raid controller for freebsd?
On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Geoffrey Giesemann wrote: On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 04:34:57PM -0500, Charles Sprickman wrote: -They added a moving part (2-wire fan, no tach) to a mission-critical part. That seems real stupid. After the bearings die in 2-3 years, what happens to your card? Does it melt or just start acting weird? If the engineers didn't consider that, what other failure modes did their limited creativity miss? :) The fan does have a tachometer which you can monitor from the card BIOS or using the cli binary. You can also disable the tachometer so you can swap the heatsink+fan for the larger heatsink (w/o fan) that comes in the box. These were a few of the things that their pre-sales folks were not able to tell me... You can find all of this out by *gasp* reading the manual. I did flip through it fairly quickly, but I'm not even sure that these features were available at the time I compared the Areca to the 3Ware. The best info I could find at the time about the fan was looking at the picture on their website - it showed a small heatsink+fan with two wires (no tach). I'm certainly not trying to push people away from the Areca cards - the more FreeBSD people out there using these the better. Next time we may buy some Arecas since I now am finding some positive feedback from the FreeBSD community. Charles --Geoff ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
