Re: SATA Raid Controller

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 07:42:41AM +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 10:15:58PM +0200, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 02:18:01PM +0200, Felix Resch wrote:
> > > i`m looking forward to build a fileserver with a raid5 storage running
> > > netbsd(-current).
> > > 
> > > I`ve looked over the hardware compat list to find any suitable card
> > > supporting at least four sata2 drives but the listed hardware is
> > > somewhat old which makes me wonder if there are newer cards also beeing
> > > known to work with current?
> > 
> > I'm happy with 3ware 9550 series. They even work under netbsd-3.
> 
> I had a 3ware for a while, but was disappointed in the RAID5 performance.
> I talked to the 3ware tech support and while they were trying to help,
> the problem was never solved.

For read or write ? writes without the battery-backed cache are slow,
but that expected.

> 
> I'm now using Areca ARC-1261 and it's a lot faster, even in RAID6 mode.
> Works Just Fine under 4.0 (and even better in -current).
> 
> # time dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1m count=10000
> 10000+0 records in
> 10000+0 records out
> 10485760000 bytes transferred in 53.668 secs (195381978 bytes/sec)
> 0.000u 26.324s 0:53.69 49.0%    0+0k 74+161io 0pf+0w

From memory this is what I get with the 3ware, both read and writes
(in raid5 mode, with the battery-backed cache) under NetBSD 3.1_STABLE.
I can't test now, because I'm using 2 3ware in a software raid-1 and of course
this impacts performances a lot (especially reads, I'm not sure why - I guess
the controllers don't see a sequencial read any more with the load-balancing
done by the raidframe raid-1). 

But I suspect all this is hightly hardware-dependant, especially
chipset-dependant. Tests not run on the same motherboard with the
same settings don't mean much ...

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--