On 8/23/06, Bob Willcox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 12:02:47PM +0200, Willem Jan Withagen wrote:
> Steven Hartland wrote:
> >The Areca cards I can recommend. Highpoint 1820a is surprisingly good
> >for its price and the later cards have better performance still apparently.
> >N.B. Use the min stripe size when creating the array for max performance
> >with this card under FreeBSD.
>
> I was more thinking along the lines of a HighPoint 2720, but perhaps a 1820
> would also do fine. What device driver would one use with that.
>
> [Ahhh, 'man -k highpoint' is your friend]
> Now what I liked about the 3ware stuff was that there are tools to work the
> raid from within FreeBSD. So that would require the newers ones...
>
> But the hardware list is only showing the 2320 and 2322 with a rr232x(4)
> driver. Which sort of makes me wonder for all the other stuff and their
> drivers.
>
> The motherboard has both PCI-X and PCI-E so that should not be a connector
> problem. Now which bus is faster: 64Bit PCI-X at 133 Mhz, or a PCI-E 16x?
The x16 PCI-E has considerably faster theoretical speed than 133 PCI-X
(appx. 4GBs vs. 1GBs). However, the RAID controllers that I've seen are
at most x8 so they are only capable of transfer rates half that fast
(2GBs). Personally, I would go with PCI-E since in some performance
tests I did with Areca cards last year (both PCI-E and PCI-X) there
appeared to be a slight performance advantage to the PCI-E cards (sorry,
I don't recall any of the specifics anymore, so please take that for
what it's worth).
I agree. PCIe 8x is a faster bus and it's typically connected directly
to the MCH (north bridge) unlike PCI-X which is stuck on the ICH
(south bridge). Also the 2GB/s that was quoted for PCIe 8x is it's
one-way data rate "after" calculating in overhead. It's a dual simplex
interface meaning it has one path to send data and another path to
receive data. Imagine a simple two lane road.
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