-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 13 Aug 2008, at 18:05, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:35:13AM -0500, M Graff wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1I need to purchase a 4-port (or more) serial SATA RAID card for a serverI'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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin) iD8DBQFIpKkaKJmr+nqSTbYRAmmSAJ9XhnTW8CBLU5CltyQ/6b+qas4UvwCfQFza gPlwJb4GaFlPO9T4bepfw78= =UiBJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----