Adaptec 7805q RAID 6 + SSD vs 6805 RAID 10

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lizardking009

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Nov 18, 2005
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I know we have a few users with the 7-series Adaptec cards using maxCache 3.0 so I'm hoping that they'll weigh in.

I'm currently using a 6805 with a RAID 10 of 8x4tb drives - Seagate ST4000DX000 drives for my storage on my Hyper-V server. Performance is good but I think storage is the slow point of my system. I'm currently moving my virtualization platform to vSphere 5.1 so now is the time to redo storage.

I'm thinking of buying a 7805q with a pair of Mushkin 480gb SSDs (already have one) and using 6 of the 4tb drives in RAID 6. The capacity will be the same, but if the performance numbers from the 71605q thread are to believed, I will see a tremendous increase in IOPS for my array.

Thoughts?
 
I've done a simultaneous boot of 19 VMs at once off my 71605Q with only a 240GB intel 520 RAID-1 SSD cache and no VM took significantly longer to boot than if I had booted them individually, Hyper-V does a slight staggering when starting that many VMs but only ~30 seconds to get them all to a "running" state and most of the smaller VMs were available after 30 seconds from starting or less than a minute from hitting the "start" button. Most of those were set to suspend on system shutdown which under WS2012 means they have to allocate as much disk space as they use RAM so that's like 50GB for all of them.

I'd say skip the 7805Q and go straight to the 71605Q since it's only like $100 difference at retail and you're adding 8 more "real" ports, so if you ever decide to go crazy and add a ton more SSDs you could at least see some increased speed over using an expander limited to 8 ports.

This weekend I installed a new VM from a syspreped template I have on both my VM hosts, one with the adaptec, the other with the VMs running straight off SSD, initially the one straight off SSD was way faster than the uncached copy on the adaptec box, but after installing updates and a couple reboots and the card figuring out it needed to cache that data there wasn't a discernible difference between the two VMs.

A bunch of Samsung 840 Pro 256GB's are definitely on my "to buy" list, might get 2-4 more later this month, I'd like to see what would happen if I put like 8 samsungs as a RAID-5 cache with a bunch of WD Red data drives, then carve out a couple TB chunk as an iSCSI target, throw a X540 in my server and desktop, and boot off that iSCSI drive.
 
3 WD reds and a 2TB Hitachi "coolspin" drive I had laying around in RAID-5 (i.e. really slow)
 
I dunno if it's the best solution or not, LSI obviously has their cachecade version as well, but the adaptec 7 series had twice the cache RAM, twice the PCIe bandwidth, twice the SSD max cache size (2TB vs 1TB), allows RAID-5/6 to be used for SSD cache (CC 2.0 documentation states it requires RAID-0/1/10), and twice the SAS chip speed (16 native ports vs 8 + whatever expander ports) for around the same price so seemed worth the risk.

Decided to give it a chance since the intel RST SSD cache always received decent reviews with the caveat "needs more than 64GB of cache", and this thing allows up to 2TB of SSD cache. Adaptec also has something along the lines of matrix RAID, so if you're like me and have 2 3TB drives and 2 2TB drives and stick them in a RAID-5, you can make another RAID-0 or RAID-1 out of the 1TB free on the 2 3TB drives instead of just letting it go to waste. Another thing Adaptec specifically mentions that the LSI may or may not do is you can RAID-1 a SSD with a spinner and the while the writes will be as slow as the spinner, the reads will be exclusively off the SSD for max speed. Another feature I liked was how you can do something along the lines of a matrix RAID with SSDs and allocate some of the capacity to caching and the rest to a RAID to pass through to the OS (boot disk, high speed pure SSD storage, etc). LSI may or may not have some or all of these features but Adaptec definitely did the better job of advertising their strengths and flexibility in the SSD field, which combined with the hardware advantages stated above definitely made it worth the ~$1000 risk. Oh and it comes with the batteryless version of their BBU standard with all 7Q series cards. These pages here got Adaptec at least one sale.

It's important to keep in mind this is a new product, seems to have been in limited quantity, and, as an enterprise product, seems to have not seen [strike=0]much[/s] any attention from review sites as of yet so it's hard to know if they delivered on the performance they claim. I really didn't have any time to play around/test it as it was purchased to fill an immediate need, that of providing uptime protection to my main VM host, as I had been running on 2 240GB intel 520's in JBOD with no redundancy. Yes I had backups but downtime still sucks ass for something as easily compensated for such as drive failure.

Honestly I just bought the card and threw whatever spare drives I had on it and bought an extra 3TB red cause that's all I had in my "IT budget" for the March, so it's mostly a hodgepodge of slow drives and my two SSDs that used to be in a 480GB JBOD drive now in a 240GB RAID-1 cache for 6TB of 5k RPM RAID-5. Benchmarks on it aren't great but that's probably for a few reasons, like the benchmarks not really "hitting" the cache due to the fact that most create new files every time they start so the cache algorithms don't see much "repeat business" on them, and also even with deduplicating all my VM hosts I still have more unique data than would fit in the cache, so the cache is probably a bit full. Also I don't imagine having ~20 VMs running on the drive improves benchmark results any.

I will say I know what it feels like to run 4-5 VMs off a 7k RPM RAID-5 and even 5k RPM RAID-10, and it's not fun. Like I said 20 VMs off 5k RAID-5 + 240GB cache, not even an issue, empty servers or win7/8 VMs are ready to log in and use within 30 seconds of hitting the start button on them, even with the 20 other VMs running. The server it's on has 64GB RAM right now and I'll be getting another 128GB for it soon because 192GB RAM (it's its own reason), so I can pretty much fit any VM I fancy to in there (and do) but I need the block storage subsystem to handle enough VMs to fit in 192GB of RAM and so far this Adaptec is filling that role quite nicely even with the random drives, I imagine when I get 8x 3TB red's in RAID-6 and 8x 256GB Samsung 840 Pro's in RAID-5 as a cache (and a sliver out of each drive for a boot disk) it will be that much better.

Is the Adaptec 7 series a bit of a risk right now? Yup.
Does the hardware and drivers seem fast enough and stable enough for me so far? Yup
Is the configuration software garbage and makes you want to choke the software team that made it? Absolutely (if I were considering this for production deployment for a business environment the software might actually give me pause due to it not being reliable if errors pop up, but for home use when you can just reboot and fix whatever it is from the BIOS it's less of an issue)
Are you still glad you put out the $970. Yup.
Would you do it again? Yup
If benchmarks finally do come out and the LSI w/ CC 2.0 turns out to be faster will you be disappointed? Well, duh, but I knew the risks, just means I'd pick a different card if I ever upgrade the card in my other server.
 
This is for home use right now. I might recommend it for a NAS at work down the road, but I agree with you that it is far too new and risky.
 
Hello from Adaptec by PMC,

As a company, we always love reading success stories, and it’s great to hear that your Adaptec 71605Q has been a positive investment and addition to your current setup thus far. I don’t want to interject too much into your thread, but would simply like to highlight that we are available to assist you in any way we can with future configuration questions or issues you may experience. If you would like to contact us, there are several methods listed here.

I would only like to further add, that in reviewing the information you have posted thus far, there were a couple items that stood out that we would be more than happy to work with you on directly.

1) You mention you intend to purchase Samsung 840 Pro SSD’s as potential additions to your 71605Q. We are currently tracking an issue with those specific SSD models and I would suggest contacting us prior to your purchase to get the latest on their compatibility. For a complete list of qualified hardware with your Series 7 controller, please review the compatibility report here.

2) Your experiences and feedback on our new maxView Storage Manager utility would be good to document, so I would encourage you to open up some direct dialog with us using the contact info provided above. Our maxView utility is a complete re-write over our previous Adaptec Storage Manager utility and our Series 7 product is the first generation to leverage this new management software. As such, we are actively working on gathering feedback and scrutinizing field issues in hopes of identifying areas of improvement. With each release of maxView, we are currently seeing hefty updates to its features and functionality, but realize we still have work to do. Therefore I encourage you to check our website for maxView updates and ensure that you’re running our most current release. To that specifically, we should have a new version releasing in the coming weeks.

Thanks and have a great day.

Adaptec by PMC Technical Support
 
Oh I've opened at least 2 tickets in relation to maxView and done some correspondence on each, last time you guys just stopped responding to me after a while. I will definitely open a ticket on the 840's though as I was hoping to use a couple of 512's to be able to someday hit that 2TB max within the 8 drive limit.
 
Hello from Adaptec by PMC,

I am sorry you have open tickets on ASK US concerning maxView. Can you please open a new case with the contact information used for the maxView tickets? When you open the new case, please mark the subject "Attn: Liz" so I can find the previous incidents and follow them up properly.

Thanks,

Adaptec by PMC Technical Support
 
I'm not a huge fan of the new MaxView system due to its overall clunkiness, but I'm glad to know it's being actively developed. It's a minor gripe, as I rarely need to go back into the GUI once things are set up. As for the 71605Q, my setup has been working very well after some help with support.
 
When I had a drive drop out of RAID twice I wasn't overly impressed with how well it was able to track the issue fixing itself, one time (on the previous MV version) it didn't even show anything was wrong, second time I never saw any updates on build progress to see where it was in the repair. The temperature monitor on it also seems to be stuck on the temperature it was when it first booted up, I'll set my fans to max speed and it will show ~50C in MV, then turn the fans back to auto and it will still read the exact same temp, then reboot the system and see the temp jump up to ~60C, turn the fan back to max, and the temp stays exactly the same.

It wouldn't be too bad if it worked properly, it's just too much stuff straight doesn't work, but like you said it doesn't really seem to negatively affect the hardware (other than when you try to SATA secure erase a SSD on the last version of MV and it crashes the host >_>)
 
Was looking at some of the "non standard" RAID options these cards have and saw the "RAID-1E" aka striped mirror, now kinda curious what kind of performance that one has on SSDs... might be worth the risk to get a few 840 pro's to find out...
 
Sorry for hitting an old thread, I was just wondering if MaxView has gotten any better? I'm really liking the specs on this card but if the software is indeed horrible, I'd rather find another solution.
 
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