I forgot to mention - if you want better read & write speed, go with RAID 1 with 10K RPM drives. You will get 33% better read and write speed. Add another drive to for a three drive RAID 1 and you'll gain another 25%. A 4th drive will add about 20% better performance.
RAID 10 is the best of both worlds. I'm running a six drive RAID 10 at a local Dominos franchise. I partitioned a 80 GIG boot drive on the RAID and formatting took 45 seconds! Thanks, Tom Hargrave www.kegkits.com http://www.kegkits.com/JABF/ 256-656-1924 -----Original Message----- From: mercedes-boun...@okiebenz.com [mailto:mercedes-boun...@okiebenz.com] On Behalf Of Tom Hargrave Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 11:52 PM To: 'Curt Raymond'; 'Diesel List' Subject: Re: [MBZ] SATA controller? RAID 6 is a more secure RAID 5. RAID 6 calculates and writes double the checksum blocks that RAID 5 writes. Both RAID 5 and 6 suffer a performance penalty. This is why RAID 5 and 6 controllers have cache, to make up for some of the performance hit. Even with the buffer, many RAID 5 and 6 arrays perform worse than the single drives they are made of. I suggest building a good RAID 0 from two 10K RPM drives and a good controller. Write speed will be the same but you will have a 33 percent read speed improvement. Thanks, Tom 256-656-1924 -----Original Message----- From: "Curt Raymond" <curtlud...@yahoo.com> To: "Diesel List" <mercedes@okiebenz.com> Sent: 4/22/09 9:32 PM Subject: Re: [MBZ] SATA controller? Wow, thats a great reply thanks, though those cards are probably way more serious than I need. The computer they'd go into is an old HP xw8000 I salvaged from work. I don't care for anything other than RAID 0 for my use, all my material will be from timecode source so if it goes away I just redigitize... When you say 1 Gig per minute, you're meaning 16.6MB/s? (or 17 I guess if your GB is 1024MB). Thats not really fast enough for what I want you're using these in a server sort of environment? Video is really a world unto itself. I'd want to do 2 streams of uncompressed SD at least, 3 would be better so I'll need 50-75MB/s sustained throughput, 4 SATA drives should be able to handle that pretty easily. My 4 SCSI drives will do 6. I don't need huge storage at home 2TB would be plenty. If I get a really big project I could use a system at work. The big system in my classroom is 32TB and capable of 400MB/s. It scales all the way up to 384TB which would be 4800MB/s total bandwidth. With a 10Gb connection we've clocked clients at 500MB/s... Its pretty amazing. You're right about USB 2, it sucks for data transfer, firewire 400 is faster. USB 2 is bus adjudicated too so if you've got a USB 2 printer it'll suck up half the bandwidth, got a USB 2 scanner? Then each device gets 1/3 the bandwidth if its doing something or not... Cruel joke that USB 2. -Curt Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:06:25 -0400 From: dave walton <walton.d...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [MBZ] SATA controller? To: Mercedes Discussion List <mercedes@okiebenz.com> Message-ID: <1ec5633a0904221406r68d97fb9mc73216e88b569...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 I've been using 3Ware. It works okay. Use the 9500S for PCI-X and the 9650SE for PCI-E. The main drawback to 3Ware is that they don't support VMWare ESX. They have a driver, but it sucks. If you want to run that you need to use Adaptec-SAS or Areca. But then you run into problems with the 2Tb limit of VMWare. I tried the Adaptec 3805. Works okay but does not have a 2Tb carving function so you have to run multiple small arrays under ESX. I've not tried Areca but have heard good things about them. I've had nothing but problems with Promise and Highpoint controllers, but that was a few years ago by now. Maybe they improved. I suspect not. For partitions > 2Tb you need to use Guid not MBR volumes. That means you can't boot off the large partition unless you are running an Intel Itanium based system with it's special version of Windows. 3Ware 9650 has a feature to create a smaller boot partition from a large array that looks like it's own drive to Windows. That saves you from dedicating drives just to boot from. Also - beware of running very large Dynamic volumes under Vista. It does not like them. You need to use Windows 2003 or 2008 for that. I was trying to configure a 10Tb volume and it became corrupted when rebooting under Vista. I switched to Server 2008 and the problems went away. My largest array is 16 - 1.5Tb SATA drives that gives just under 19TB usable using Raid-6. I use that for organizing backups before I archive them. I get 3-5 Gig per minute throughput if I turn on write caching. I'm lucky to get 1Gpm with caching off. I got the Adaptec 3805 (8-port) for $300 on eBay with the battery backup module. I've seen the 3Ware 9650SE 16 port go for < $500. You definitely need the BBU. I've already lost one array when a machine blue-screened under heavy IO and did not have one installed. All the controllers support adding additional drives and migrating the array to include them so you can increase capacity. 3Ware also supports incrementally swapping drives out for larger capacity ones, but you need a custom script from Support to expand the array to include the extra space. I've not tried that yet. Keep in mind that the cluster size you start with has to accommodate the largest partition size you will use. That is to say that you can't format with a 512 byte cluster and later expand to a partition > 2Tb. So I started out my 19Tb partition with an 8192 byte cluster even though I did not have all 16 drives in the initial configuration. On a final note, getting data in and out of a large array can take a while. I started using USB 2.0 external SATA Docking stations, but they maxed out at ~ 20 Mb/sec. I switched to ESATA and that number rose to 50 - 80 Mb/sec depending on the drive. HTH -Dave Walton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://okiebenz.com/pipermail/mercedes_okiebenz.com/attachments/2009042 2/ba20fdb5/attachment.html> _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.557 / Virus Database: 270.12.2/2072 - Release Date: 4/21/2009 4:48 PM _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. 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