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Re: Supported RAID SATA cards



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On 13 Aug 2008, at 18:05, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:35:13AM -0500, M Graff wrote:
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I need to purchase a 4-port (or more) serial SATA RAID card for a server
I'm building.  Any recommendations?

Ideally, it should be something I can check from NetBSD while it is
running, and swap drives in and out as needed.

I have 2 servers running with 2 8-port 3ware 9550sx each. I'm quite
happy with them (under NetBSD 3.x), and can be controller from
NetBSD using the tw_cli FreeBSD binary.

I'm also using a (4-port) 3ware 9550sx, it has served me well and in particular the tw_cli utility is very useful. My only complaint is that the card is clearly optimised for a small number of simultaneous IO streams. I.e. in my case, using this on a Xen DOM0 with DOMUs that I sometimes use for students, everything is great when I have 4 DOMUs compiling (i.e. lots of writes) but if I have 12 DOMUs running, performance is not 1/3 but rather 1/15.

When I compare this to an Adaptec I had before then the 3ware is much better (faster) for a few streams, but the Adaptec, albeit slower overall, had a less pronounced "performace knee" when adding DOMUs.

But then, all RAID cards are compromises of course. Next time I will probably test an Areca, but I don't know if they can be controlled as well from NetBSD as the 3ware with tw_cli.

Regards,

Johan

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