On Apr 8, 2005, at 4:35 PM, Bob Henkel wrote:
desktop SATA drive with no RAID? I'm by any means as knowledgeable about I/O
setup as many of you are but my 2 cents wonders if the Dell RAID is really
that much slower than a competitively priced/speced alternative? Would
Joel's problems just fade away if he wasn't using a Dell RAID?
"Dell RAID" is not one thing. They sell "altered" RAID cards from Adaptec and LSI. Whatever alteration they do to them tends to make them run not so fast.
I have a Dell SATA RAID (adaptec based) on the office server and it is OK, though not something I'd buy again.
I have various PERC 3 and PERC 4 RAID controllers on my servers (SCSI based) and they suck under heavy I/O load.
I wonder why the name-brand LSI cards work so much faster... perhaps it is the motherboard? I don't know, and I don't care... :-) For me, high performance DB and Dell servers are mutually exclusive.
Vivek Khera, Ph.D. +1-301-869-4449 x806
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