On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Alverson, Tom (Xetron) <[email protected]> wrote: > The P800 ... is "the highest performing controller > in the SAS portfolio"
Does it have dedicated silicon for XOR? That's what matters. This might be called an "XOR engine" or "XOR co-processor" or "RAID-5 accelerator" or something along those lines. In this past, it was always a separate ASIC, although these days, I wouldn't be surprised to find that microprocessors with a built-in XOR vector engine are available. > ... "supports over 100 hard drives" ... How many drives it can support has little-to-nothing to do with RAID performance. That's more about the actual SAS/SATA interface controller chip. The RAID part is almost always implemented as one or more chips separate from the actual disk interface. (As a good design practice, a controller that can support more drives should have more computational ability to go with it, but if they're quoting 100+ drives they're obviously talking theory, not real-world performance, so I wouldn't bet on that.) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
