Re: [PLUG] SAS/SATA Raid Controller Advice

[Gordon Dexter <gordon@texasdex.com>]

Lee Marzke wrote:

Brian Vagnoni wrote:
  

So what are people using?

First, I'm looking to upgrade my SCSI U320 drives, cage, and Intel U320 PCI-X SRUC42X to something more modern. Through supported by Linux & VMWare well, it's no longer support by Microsoft as of Server 2008. Yeah I know #$$%^^ Microsoft. U320 drives are becoming hard to find, not to mention the heat, as well as the cost vs capacity issue. 

I try and run everything, all the time. I have a spare PCI-e x16 slot just begging me to stick something in it(no jokes please :-).  I just picked up an Enlight EN-87211-A05 5 drive SAS/SATA-2 drive cage that fits in my Enlight case for $60.00 on ebay. This will replace the Enlight EN-8721-B02 U320 cage I have in there now. Though my new cage is white in color, and my old one is black, I think I can live with it for $60. I figure I need at least 8 internal channels.

3Ware was recently acquired by LSI Logic, so I imagine I can get some good deals on 3Ware branded stuff on ebay,com. 

So my questions is what are people using? Are SAS drives likes WD Velociraptor's worth the extra money?

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Brian Vagnoni
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What are you running on the drives,  it make a big difference.

My current server has 4x  320GB SATA II   running  ESXi 4.0,   and an
external Infrant 1TB ReadyNAS
(now Netgear ).    The  NAS is used for VM backups,  and  NFS mounts for
large data , like my
gallery2 photo collection,  while the VM's run on DAS.


Iomega has a new StorCenter ix4-200d  with 4 drives and iSCSI,  and I've
experimented with
OpenFiler and NexentaStor on the software side.

Lee
  

I would like to put in a few words against HighPoint "RocketRaid" fakeraid controllers.  These do RAID calculations at the driver level rather than the hardware level, resulting in mediocre performance and trouble booting from them.  I've had to deal with a server that was very well specced except that it had these pieces of junk in it, and it's been very frustrating, especially with their binary blob driver (which I think has crashed the machine once or twice).  This page: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html has a nice summary of different products and their Linux support, although it's a bit out of date.

--Gordon

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