Re: RAID Cards
On Thu, 2005-Jun-30 17:18:15 -0400, Simon wrote: It's not only CPU factor, I don't trust software RAID. I suspect you don't have a choice. Either the RAID is done in the kernel on your host system or the RAID is done in the the firmware on your RAID card. In either case, it's software. -- Peter Jeremy ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
Simon wrote: Just because there is no monitoring tool available due to lack of support, doesn't mean the card itself is bad. You wouldn't be saying that if you had had one of your RAIDed drives fail and had no indication whatsoever that it had done so. IMHO, OS level monitoring of a RAID is vital. The sad fact is most manufacturers don't receive enough FreeBSD demand to support it :-( I wish and keep waiting for this to change one day. I would be very happy then, but until then... The sad fact is that most manufacturers are not prepared to release enough information about their boards for a native CLI to be written. Even a source code Linux driver would significantly aid a FreeBSD version, but most manufacturer's prefer to keep their dirty secrets hidden. --Alex ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On 6/26/05, Bob Bomar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am looking to build a new file server. I have used Promise cards exclusivly in the past, but I am looking at Highpoint cards for this machine. Anybody have any opinions on RAID cards? I've had no real trouble with the Highpoint 1540 SATA card. The downloadable drivers work fine under 5.3, but the install/setup is a bit strange. The drivers are on a floppy disk image that you just mount. Included in the tgz file is a pdf file that describes the installation instructions (there is no text file with the equivelent information). --Joe ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Jul 1, 2005, at 3:19 AM, Peter Jeremy wrote: On Thu, 2005-Jun-30 17:18:15 -0400, Simon wrote: It's not only CPU factor, I don't trust software RAID. I suspect you don't have a choice. Either the RAID is done in the kernel on your host system or the RAID is done in the the firmware on your RAID card. In either case, it's software. Sure, everything in the end is SW anymore, at least at a controlling level. But it does not involve the OS and can have special HW circuits used to perform certain functions much faster. It reduces the strain on the OS. Chad --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 04:34:13PM -0500, Dan Nelson wrote: In the last episode (Jun 30), Mark Bucciarelli said: I don't see the big win in hardware raid. The three big plusses for hardware raid are: if you get one with battery-backed cache (strongly recommended), then the array can cache raid-5 writes until it gets full stripes, and can hold off doing mirror writes if there are pending read requests. Ah ... this is certainly a win for an io-bound system. Also, if your power goes out or the system spontaneously reboots, you won't have to rebuild parity or resync the mirrors (assuming battery-backed cache). We pay a lot of money to ensure the lights stay on and sacrifice small animals to avoid spontaneous reboots. And finally, hardware raid cards will automatically rebuild onto a hot spare I know I could do this with Linux software raid, not sure about gmirror. if available and you can swap out the dead drive and swap a new spare in without having to run a single command. Another win. Thanks, your brought up some issues I hadn't thought of. I expect hardware raid cards will go the way of modems and printers and offload their processing to the main CPU. And I guess the choice partly depends on whose software you trust more--free software from FreeBSD or proprietary code written in a cathedral. You can probabaly guess my bias. ;) m ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
Bob Bomar wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I am looking to build a new file server. I have used Promise cards exclusivly in the past, but I am looking at Highpoint cards for this machine. Anybody have any opinions on RAID cards? My 2c: RAID cards suck, because they are difficult to monitor consistently. For a lot of my systems, I've been deploying gmirror, which can mirror a pair of drives, even at the system level. Works great, easy to monitor through standard tools, no firmware / driver / kernel version / userland conflicts and generally better performance. YMWV, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
Just because there is no monitoring tool available due to lack of support, doesn't mean the card itself is bad. I much prefer hardware implementation than software. True hardware RAID frees up a lot of CPU time if you have heavy IO and software just can't keep up if you utilize CPU intensive apps. The sad fact is most manufacturers don't receive enough FreeBSD demand to support it :-( I wish and keep waiting for this to change one day. I would be very happy then, but until then... -Simon On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:09:05 -0700, Danny Howard wrote: Bob Bomar wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I am looking to build a new file server. I have used Promise cards exclusivly in the past, but I am looking at Highpoint cards for this machine. Anybody have any opinions on RAID cards? My 2c: RAID cards suck, because they are difficult to monitor consistently. For a lot of my systems, I've been deploying gmirror, which can mirror a pair of drives, even at the system level. Works great, easy to monitor through standard tools, no firmware / driver / kernel version / userland conflicts and generally better performance. YMWV, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ ___ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 04:48:18PM -0400, Simon wrote: Just because there is no monitoring tool available due to lack of support, doesn't mean the card itself is bad. I much prefer hardware implementation than software. True hardware RAID frees up a lot of CPU time if you have heavy IO and software just can't keep up if you utilize CPU intensive apps. When you have a dual Xeon setup, you are more likely to be bound by disk than CPU. And a RAID that you can not monitor is a BAD RAID. The biggest thing that bothers me about my current environment is that I have remotely-deployed machines with RAIDs and I can't tell when a disk goes bad unless I visit the datacenter. Last time I was there I had a RAID card throwing an audible alarm, even though nothing was wrong. I had to reboot a critical system to fix that. If you can implement it in software, then its worth the headaches you'll avoid with hardware dependencies. If you're concerned at CPU overhead, spend the cash you would have spent on a RAID card and upgrade your CPU. Sincerely, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 04:48:18PM -0400, Simon wrote: Just because there is no monitoring tool available due to lack of support, doesn't mean the card itself is bad. I much prefer hardware implementation than software. True hardware RAID frees up a lot of CPU time if you have heavy IO and software just can't keep up if you utilize CPU intensive apps. Why do you say hardware raid frees up a lot of CPU time? Have you measured this? Do you have any servers that are cpu-bound instead of io-bound? I am having this exact discussion with my business partner at the moment--he is also a proponent of hardware raid. I don't see the big win in hardware raid. I should probably search the archives, I sure this topic has been covered in detail before ... m ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
It's not only CPU factor, I don't trust software RAID. As for monitoring, I can tell whether or not a drive is dead via SAFTE chip and all SCSI RAID cards support SAFTE and a proper SCSI server would have SAFTE support. As for SATA, the 3ware cards have 3dm tool to monitor the array. -Simon On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:57:44 -0700, Danny Howard wrote: On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 04:48:18PM -0400, Simon wrote: Just because there is no monitoring tool available due to lack of support, doesn't mean the card itself is bad. I much prefer hardware implementation than software. True hardware RAID frees up a lot of CPU time if you have heavy IO and software just can't keep up if you utilize CPU intensive apps. When you have a dual Xeon setup, you are more likely to be bound by disk than CPU. And a RAID that you can not monitor is a BAD RAID. The biggest thing that bothers me about my current environment is that I have remotely-deployed machines with RAIDs and I can't tell when a disk goes bad unless I visit the datacenter. Last time I was there I had a RAID card throwing an audible alarm, even though nothing was wrong. I had to reboot a critical system to fix that. If you can implement it in software, then its worth the headaches you'll avoid with hardware dependencies. If you're concerned at CPU overhead, spend the cash you would have spent on a RAID card and upgrade your CPU. Sincerely, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
In the last episode (Jun 30), Mark Bucciarelli said: On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 04:48:18PM -0400, Simon wrote: Just because there is no monitoring tool available due to lack of support, doesn't mean the card itself is bad. I much prefer hardware implementation than software. True hardware RAID frees up a lot of CPU time if you have heavy IO and software just can't keep up if you utilize CPU intensive apps. Why do you say hardware raid frees up a lot of CPU time? Have you measured this? Do you have any servers that are cpu-bound instead of io-bound? I am having this exact discussion with my business partner at the moment--he is also a proponent of hardware raid. I don't see the big win in hardware raid. The three big plusses for hardware raid are: if you get one with battery-backed cache (strongly recommended), then the array can cache raid-5 writes until it gets full stripes, and can hold off doing mirror writes if there are pending read requests. Also, if your power goes out or the system spontaneously reboots, you won't have to rebuild parity or resync the mirrors (assuming battery-backed cache). And finally, hardware raid cards will automatically rebuild onto a hot spare if available and you can swap out the dead drive and swap a new spare in without having to run a single command. -- Dan Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Jun 30, 2005, at 3:34 PM, Dan Nelson wrote: In the last episode (Jun 30), Mark Bucciarelli said: On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 04:48:18PM -0400, Simon wrote: Just because there is no monitoring tool available due to lack of support, doesn't mean the card itself is bad. I much prefer hardware implementation than software. True hardware RAID frees up a lot of CPU time if you have heavy IO and software just can't keep up if you utilize CPU intensive apps. Why do you say hardware raid frees up a lot of CPU time? Have you measured this? Do you have any servers that are cpu-bound instead of io-bound? I am having this exact discussion with my business partner at the moment--he is also a proponent of hardware raid. I don't see the big win in hardware raid. The three big plusses for hardware raid are: if you get one with battery-backed cache (strongly recommended), then the array can cache raid-5 writes until it gets full stripes, and can hold off doing mirror writes if there are pending read requests. Also, if your power goes out or the system spontaneously reboots, you won't have to rebuild parity or resync the mirrors (assuming battery-backed cache). And finally, hardware raid cards will automatically rebuild onto a hot spare if available and you can swap out the dead drive and swap a new spare in without having to run a single command. I am not an expert at all, but I believe the following to be true and advantages of true HW raid cards. To add to the above from Dan Nelson. -- HW raid cards reduce the traffic on your PCI bus. One read or write request is issued and one set of data goes over the PCI bus. The card itself worries about talking to the drives and reading or writing the data from the appropriate drives -- even if you are not CPU bound in terms of fully using the complete CPU, if you are busy, the CPU has a queue of things to do and I like to keep the CPU queue as small as possible... For example, busy PHP based sites can queue up lots of processes even if the load does not peg the CPU due to other considerations, we can avoid extraneous context switches and extra CPU stuff -- good HW raid cards will have monitoring SW -- Adaptec, 3ware, and others do. -- simpler interface for the OS. The OS treats it as just another disk and so bugs in the OS (in your disk driver and RAID sw) don't corrupt your data as easily and in fact make you less OS and HW versions dependent, not more. --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 10:38:34PM -0600, Nethaniel St. Donovan wrote: Option 6 for Freebsd boot up screen is drop to boot commandline. Okay, that one. My problems started when I went to multi-user mode, and the RAID logical volume was accessed. Fail because whatever Linux I try (I prefer FreeBSD) the OS can't see the raid as a valid drive. I am running my collection of drives as a RAID 5, but I would think your situation should be similiar, given the 3210S is a faster version of the 3200S... Of course, I haven't tried to boot my RAID, it only contains user directories. When the Adaptec 3210S POST screen comes up, does it should one logical disk? I trust you don't have any of the ear-piercing alarms going off when the card performs its POST checks. Bruce -- I like bad! Bruce BurdenAustin, TX. - Thuganlitha The Power and the Prophet Robert Don Hughes ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: RAID Cards
Option 6 for Freebsd boot up screen is drop to boot commandline. It basically lets you set certain options so the system can load properly. I.E. it's running 100% off the CD at that moment and if you want to turn acpi off prior to boot you can. Fail because whatever Linux I try (I prefer FreeBSD) the OS can't see the raid as a valid drive. Each OS asks what drive to install to but when you look to choose which one the Raid is never in the list of option to begin loading on. -Original Message- From: Bruce Burden [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 7:10 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'Bob Bomar' Subject: Re: RAID Cards On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 12:21:02PM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can say my experience with adaptec 3200s cards has not been the most fruitful. It's been 2 weeks now and I cannot even get my system to load past the initial bootup options screen. Anything but option 6 fails. The sad thing is I have a driver but I need to load some kind of os on the system or I cannot load my driver. Fails how? I was not able to boot 5.4 with my Adaptec 3210S installed. I believe the best I got was a hang or a panic. I finally got the system to behave when I added OPTION ASR_TOOLS to the kernel. What is option 6 in the boot screen? Bruce -- I like bad! Bruce BurdenAustin, TX. - Thuganlitha The Power and the Prophet Robert Don Hughes ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: RAID Cards
I can say my experience with adaptec 3200s cards has not been the most fruitful. It's been 2 weeks now and I cannot even get my system to load past the initial bootup options screen. Anything but option 6 fails. The sad thing is I have a driver but I need to load some kind of os on the system or I cannot load my driver. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-freebsd- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bob Bomar Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 10:39 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RAID Cards -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I am looking to build a new file server. I have used Promise cards exclusivly in the past, but I am looking at Highpoint cards for this machine. Anybody have any opinions on RAID cards? - -- Bob Bomar [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.bomar.us/~bob -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCvtoQ9Jm/aTrtdKoRAveRAJ4qF21sZ52SFpnE0tCaazOHyuTiCgCggPMw xfpEYgfU3GHE2JpEB0PKfYo= =ABWH -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Jun 26, 2005, at 12:21 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can say my experience with adaptec 3200s cards has not been the most fruitful. It's been 2 weeks now and I cannot even get my system to load past the initial bootup options screen. Anything but option 6 fails. The sad thing is I have a driver but I need to load some kind of os on the system or I cannot load my driver. The adaptec 3200s is supported out of the box in FreeBSD with the asr driver (at least on i386). You should not need a separate driver. Is the adaptec at the latest firmware and is your system bios at the latest version? I had a problem with an adaptec 2200s (aac driver) with my tuan opteron board that was fixed with a system BIOS upgrade. Chad -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-freebsd- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bob Bomar Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2005 10:39 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RAID Cards -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I am looking to build a new file server. I have used Promise cards exclusivly in the past, but I am looking at Highpoint cards for this machine. Anybody have any opinions on RAID cards? - -- Bob Bomar [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.bomar.us/~bob -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCvtoQ9Jm/aTrtdKoRAveRAJ4qF21sZ52SFpnE0tCaazOHyuTiCgCggPMw xfpEYgfU3GHE2JpEB0PKfYo= =ABWH -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 11:38:42AM -0500, Bob Bomar wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 at Highpoint cards for this machine. Anybody have any opinions on RAID cards? I have had great results with the Adaptec 2200s controllers. Just remember to not enable the aacp device. -Kent- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On 6/26/05, Bob Bomar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I am looking to build a new file server. I have used Promise cards exclusivly in the past, but I am looking at Highpoint cards for this machine. Anybody have any opinions on RAID cards? I have no problems with my highpoint cards. See my other post from a few minutes ago under the thread Best hardware to mirror IDE drives under FreeBSD? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID Cards
On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 12:21:02PM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can say my experience with adaptec 3200s cards has not been the most fruitful. It's been 2 weeks now and I cannot even get my system to load past the initial bootup options screen. Anything but option 6 fails. The sad thing is I have a driver but I need to load some kind of os on the system or I cannot load my driver. Fails how? I was not able to boot 5.4 with my Adaptec 3210S installed. I believe the best I got was a hang or a panic. I finally got the system to behave when I added OPTION ASR_TOOLS to the kernel. What is option 6 in the boot screen? Bruce -- I like bad! Bruce BurdenAustin, TX. - Thuganlitha The Power and the Prophet Robert Don Hughes ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
