-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 12/19/2010 1:22 PM, Luke S Crawford wrote: > > So, in the past I have been very anti-hardware raid, mostly because > the cards I could afford wanted to charge me what another 3 spindles > would cost, and usually had only 64MiB of battery-backed cache. > Last time I benchmarked one of those cards, they were largely > indistinguishable, performance wise and reliability wise from linux > md (at the time I was testing the 'half failed' mode that so many > consumer sata drives fall into. Both the hardware raid I tested > (an expensive 3ware) and md dealt poorly with the half-failed drive. > I solved the problem by simply moving to 'enterprise' sata, and > settled on linux MD and raid 1+0, because I saw no benefit to > paying for the raid card.) > > Anyhow, I'm hearing things about new servers from dell and HP coming > with RAID cards that have on the order of 1GiB of cache; and better, > it's flash-based cache, so no battery modules to pay for/worry about. > > With that kind of cache, it seems to me like it may be time to > re-evaluate my prejudices; with enough persistent write cache, > raid5 can actually give better performance, from what I understand, > than the raid 1+0 I use, given the same number of spindles, but > that cache is pretty important. > > Anyhow, I was wondering what experiences others have had with this? > I mean, I'll have to start building larger boxes, I imagine, to > justify the cost of the card (my current systems are 8 core, > 32GiB ram 4 disk systems; it probably makes sense for me to > double or triple that, which is pretty easily doable.) > > What I'm wondering, though, is what success other people have had with > these cards, and with what Linux kernels? >
Dell's PERC H700 and H800 cards support (but don't require) NVRAM cache. LSI makes the silicon for the cards but I don't know that you can buy them direct. We've only had them for a few months but we've had no problems so far. - -- - -- Skylar Thompson ([email protected]) - -- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk0OjnAACgkQsc4yyULgN4a69QCggOlpmAjrqTWvctRO6Z3v/c1K Fo0An3Z/xHmdBbzKOQYx0eTh3ChsSEiQ =cLXZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
