Re: Supported RAID SATA cards

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <9A667A20-8EA6-4EBE-AEE4-E2C5D737C68F%johani.org@localhost>,
Johan Ihren  <johani%johani.org@localhost> wrote:
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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.

Areca is the way to go and it is controlled natively bia bioctl.
I also have a patch that ports the current code to NetBSD 4 that
I am planning to have pulled up once it is verified that it works.
(ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/people/christos/arcmsr4.0/)

In my tests it beats both megaraid and 3ware.

christos