Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
Christopher Smith wrote: Brad Campbell wrote: I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four in another for a year now... the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 drives, but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all connected drives. What distro and kernel ? Err.. well, I started with 2.4 originally and I've run 2.6.5, 2.6.9, 2.6.10-bk10, 2.6.15.1 and now 2.6.16 on both boxes.. never an issue with multiple card support.. It's based on Debian mostly, but to be honest it's not important as the kernel is always self compiled as with mdadm.. I tried this about 2 - 3 months ago and had problems whenever more than two cards were in my system, even if only a single drive was installed. I posted about it here (search for "multiple promise sata150 tx4 cards" back in January). I recall the thread.. don't think I replied then as I did not really have anything to say I guess. I have no complaints about the performance (relatively speaking, of course), but I've got the cards in a machine with multiple PCI-X busses, so it's not really bottlenecked there. Perhaps its related to that. All mine are on ASUS A7V600 motherboards with a single bog standard PCI bus. At one point early on I recall someone stating they were having all sorts of problems with those cards and a 66Mhz bus.. Are you running the latest BIOS in all the cards? Only ask as the 1st thing I did when mine arrived was to upgrade the BIOS.. not using it but I thought it might have some impact on the way they are set up on the PCI bus. I have a mate who has another 3 in his box also.. but again he's on an ASUS A7V600 motherboard. I'm looking to build another 15 drive box soon and I was thinking of perhaps a couple of 8 port Marvell cards, but then I might just stick with what I know and source some more of the same. Regards, Brad -- "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
Brad Campbell wrote:
I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four in
another for a year now... the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 drives,
but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all connected drives.
What distro and kernel ?
I tried this about 2 - 3 months ago and had problems whenever more than
two cards were in my system, even if only a single drive was installed.
I posted about it here (search for "multiple promise sata150 tx4
cards" back in January).
The symptoms were ata timeouts:
ata3: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata3: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata3: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata3: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata2: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata2: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata2: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata2: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
This would happen consistently with three controllers in, never with
two. I tried every possible combination of controllers and drives I
could think of, to eliminate any potential of broken hardware being the
cause.
I should probably give it another go, given there have been a couple of
minor kernel versions since then, but I'm surprised to hear you've had
it working for so long - no-one was able to give me a solution to my
problem at the time (I ended up getting a pair of two-channel SATA
cards) and I assumed it was a driver bug of some description. Promise,
of course, were useless, saying more than a single controller was an
unsupported configuration.
I have 11 drives in one box (on promise.. 2 on the on-board VIA and 1 on
PATA) and 15 drives in another (all across 4 promise cards).. all on
SATA150-TX4 cards..
Performance sucks.. but then when you put 15 drives on a single PCI
33Mhz bus what do you expect ?
Great for streaming media though.. (and cheap, and very reliable). The
only media errors I get are on the VIA controller. The promise
controllers have not had a single media error since they were installed.
I have no complaints about the performance (relatively speaking, of
course), but I've got the cards in a machine with multiple PCI-X busses,
so it's not really bottlenecked there.
CS
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Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
Christopher Smith wrote: Ian Thurlbeck wrote: Dear All I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md" Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of box support on a Fedora system ? I have had a lot of success with Promise TX4 cards, with the caveat that more than two controllers can't be in the same box (or couldn't as of a few months ago - this may have been fixed). They're fairly cheap and I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four in another for a year now... the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 drives, but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all connected drives. I have 11 drives in one box (on promise.. 2 on the on-board VIA and 1 on PATA) and 15 drives in another (all across 4 promise cards).. all on SATA150-TX4 cards.. Performance sucks.. but then when you put 15 drives on a single PCI 33Mhz bus what do you expect ? Great for streaming media though.. (and cheap, and very reliable). The only media errors I get are on the VIA controller. The promise controllers have not had a single media error since they were installed. Brad -- "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html > A little bit outdated though. (Amazing how many "RAID" cards are "fakeraid") well, the page is useful in that it discusses particular products, but the "fakeraid" stuff is just silly name-calling. there are either real (hardware) raid cards, and there are multiport cards. "fakeraid" just means that there is code in the bios to do software raid 0/1 - not a bad thing in any possible sense, though also of zero value to many people. the prevalence of "fakeraid" simply shows that to be worth doing, hw raid requires a pretty hefty piece of hardware, like the 3ware 9550. older boards that had, for instance, a single pc100 dimm on them were the kiss of death, since just seeing that you knew that they couldn't move more than 10-20 MB/s, much less than a single disk's worth. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
I've got several systems with pairs of Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20318 (SATA150 TX4) and no problems other than lack of support in the install kernels back when we got them (about a year and a half ago). -- Jon Lewis | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net| _ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re[2]: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
Hello Joshua, JBL> That's exactly why I recommended them. 3w- has been in the kernel a JBL> *long* time and is extremely stable. Sure, it's expensive for "just" a JBL> SATA controller, but not for a solid one that doesn't fall over at random JBL> times. Just for my 2 cents: we have a number of different generations of 3Ware cards (IDE and SATA) in our campus network, mostly with Western Digital drives. It seems quite beneficial to use their Raid Edition series of drives instead of desktop ones. Beside the longer warranty and perhaps better manufacturing and better resistance to vibration, according to the WD site, these drives also report errors (if any) quicker to a host adapter. This results in errors being handled by RAID hardware gracefully, instead of the whole drive being considered as timed out. In practice, we had some fun months with a RAID5 set made of desktop Caviars rebuilding once in a while for no apparent reason, with each disk working well for a long time. And we had no such problem with RE disks for over a year now. Hope this helps some list readers make their choice, and please don't consider this an advertisement of certain brands ;) If any other manufaturer offers capabilities similar to WD RE (especially timeouts), please take a better look if you consider a hardware RAID controller. -- Best regards, Jim Klimovmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 at 10:38pm, Mark Hahn wrote before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD. but the 9550 is really quite impressive... I like the 3wares for their ability to do true hot swap in hardware RAID mode. I have 2 older servers with 7500 cards in 'em that I recently tried to migrate to md (for speed, as you mentioned). All my testing with 'mdadm --fail' went just fine. However, when a disk actually died and the 3ware booted it, the server hung. So I migrated 'em back to hardware RAID (but RAID10 instead of RAID5). -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 at 11:28am, Mattias Wadenstein wrote On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Mark Hahn wrote: 3ware. Period. If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather than either of the 9xxx series cards. before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD. but the 9550 is really quite impressive... I'd still recommend 3ware for the md case, because of reliability. For my 6-disk raid a 8506-4 was actually slightly faster than two sil3114s running md raid5. The 3ware card has the additional advantage of not pushing the machine into a hard hang once per day or so when doing io over the raid layer. That's exactly why I recommended them. 3w- has been in the kernel a *long* time and is extremely stable. Sure, it's expensive for "just" a SATA controller, but not for a solid one that doesn't fall over at random times. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Mark Hahn wrote: 3ware. Period. If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather than either of the 9xxx series cards. before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD. but the 9550 is really quite impressive... I'd still recommend 3ware for the md case, because of reliability. For my 6-disk raid a 8506-4 was actually slightly faster than two sil3114s running md raid5. The 3ware card has the additional advantage of not pushing the machine into a hard hang once per day or so when doing io over the raid layer. You're right though in that the hw raid performance was rather bad until the 9550. /Mattias Wadenstein - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
Mark Hahn wrote: I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md" Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of box support on a Fedora system ? which FC release? I believe FC4 would have decent support for promise tx4's (there are at least two - the most recent might not work OOB). sil 3114's ought to work as well. Hi Currently FC4, but I could update to FC5 on these machines if necessary. I should add that performance is not really an issue - it's mostly a read-only data store. I don't really want to fork out 250 UKPounds per SATA card (i.e. 3ware 8506) since I don't need the capabilities (hardware RAID) nor the performance (but I suppose if I'm forking out 750 UKP for disks what's another 250?) Mike Hardy recommended the Addonics ADST114 (sil 3114) which has an entry on this page: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html A little bit outdated though. (Amazing how many "RAID" cards are "fakeraid") Thanks for the help! Ian 3ware. Period. If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather than either of the 9xxx series cards. before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD. but the 9550 is really quite impressive... regards, mark hahn - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- Ian Thurlbeckhttp://www.stams.strath.ac.uk/ Statistics and Modelling Science, University of Strathclyde Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, UK, G1 1XH Tel: +44 (0)141 548 3667 Fax: +44 (0)141 552 2079 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
> > I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach > > these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md" > > > > Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of > > box support on a Fedora system ? which FC release? I believe FC4 would have decent support for promise tx4's (there are at least two - the most recent might not work OOB). sil 3114's ought to work as well. > 3ware. Period. If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather > than either of the 9xxx series cards. before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD. but the 9550 is really quite impressive... regards, mark hahn - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 at 4:37pm, Ian Thurlbeck wrote I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md" Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of box support on a Fedora system ? 3ware. Period. If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather than either of the 9xxx series cards. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
Addonics adst114 was the cheapest one I've found that works. I found it for $41 at thenerds.net but you may be better at the price searching than me. It's a Silicon Images 3114 chip, driven by the sata_sil driver I honestly don't recall if it was out-of-the-box working on FC4, but the updated kernels drive it fine, and FC5 (with 2.6.16+) should be fine with it. -Mike Ian Thurlbeck wrote: > > Dear All > > I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach > these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md" > > Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of > box support on a Fedora system ? > > Many thanks > > Ian - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?
Dear All I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md" Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of box support on a Fedora system ? Many thanks Ian -- Ian Thurlbeckhttp://www.stams.strath.ac.uk/ Statistics and Modelling Science, University of Strathclyde Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, UK, G1 1XH Tel: +44 (0)141 548 3667 Fax: +44 (0)141 552 2079 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
