Hardware RAID 1 - which card ?

[Seth Bardash]

> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com 
> [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Rodolfo J.
Paiz
> Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 10:24 AM
> To: For users of Fedora Core releases
> Subject: Re: Hardware RAID 1 - which card ?
> 
> 
> At 12:13 PM 7/5/2004, Hannes Mayer wrote:
> >I want a hardware RAID 1 not for speed nor will it be deployed
in a 
> >high performance server, but I want good protection of my 
> data against 
> >harddisk failure and not having to reinstall the system in case
of a 
> >failure is nice too.
> 
> Do keep in mind that mistakes, user errors, power losses, and 
> other causes 
> of *data* corruption are far more common than outright hardware
disk 
> failure. If you don't have one already, *first* make a good 
> backup system, 
> *then* do RAID-1.
> 
> >I don't like software RAID - I've a much better feeling when 
> the card 
> >itself handles the mirroring.
> 
> You'll find that software RAID-1 on Linux is very mature and 
> well-tested 
> and works well. If you still want a hardware RAID card, then 
> go right ahead 
> and get one... I've not used 3Ware with the 2.6 kernel yet 
> but it's been so 
> well supported in years past I'd have no real hesitation in 
> buying their 
> stuff again.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> -- 
> Rodolfo J. Paiz
> rpaiz at simpaticus.com
> http://www.simpaticus.com
> 
> 

We have installed a 3ware 7006-2 dual channel parallel IDE card in
a 1U system running HARDWARE RAID 1 on an AMD XP3000+ based system
with 1GB of memory and using a ASUS A7N8X-VM/400 motherboard. This
system was built for a customer to use as a web server / mail
server / mysql+php engine and FC2 plus the updates including the
2.6.6 kernel were installed. The driver used was the one that came
with the kernel. A newer version is available from the 3ware site
and may provide slightly better performance.

A single disk tested with hdparm -Tt /dev/hda gave a performance
of ~42 MB /sec

The mirrored disk was tested with hdparm -Tt /dev/sda on the 3ware
7006-2 gave a performance number of ~57 MB / sec

running zcav -u root /dev/sda to read the whole disk array in 100
MB chunks gave a performance of ~ 57 MB / sec at the beginning of
the disk and ~ 45 MB / sec at the end of the array. 

The disks used were Maxtor 80 GB Hard Disks, PN 6Y080P0, ATA-133,
7200 RPM, 8MB Cache.

Hardware RAID 1 with the right controller can provide outstanding
performance. 

Your milage may vary.... but we have not seen any onboard
controllers that can match this with such low CPU utilization.

Best,    ;-)

Seth Bardash

Integrated Solutions and Systems
1510 North Gate Road
Colorado Springs, CO 80921

http://www.integratedsolutions.org

Phone: 719-495-5866
Fax:   719-495-5870

Supplier of AMD, Intel and SPARC Servers and Systems running
Windows, Linux, Solaris and VxWorks.


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