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Best Choice: SATA RAID-5 controller

L

LoneWolf

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 13, 2004
Messages
3,190
Okay, I'm working up a proposal for a budget rackmount (probably 2U) server designed for server-to-disk backup or possibly high-capacity storage. Serial ATA seems the most reasonable way to go, so I'll probably spec out 4-6 large Seagate SATA drives for the purpose.

I'm at the point where I need to look at a controller. Conditions I've set so far are price (under $300, unfortunately eliminating 3Ware as an option), number of drives (minimum 4 drives, but 6 is good too), RAID 5 support, and support for bootable arrays. So far I've found the following solutions that appear to meet the task:

Promise FastTrak S150 SX4-M

Adaptec 2410SA

LSI Megaraid SATA 150-6

HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A

I'm looking to use probably an Intel or Tyan server board (though I'll take recommendations) with a single P4 CPU, probably one of the lower-end ones that still supports HyperThreading. I'd like to hear from anyone who has had experience with any of these controllers and how they worked, not just performance-wise, but drivers/management applications, CPU utilization, ease of repairing a failed disk, whether the hot-swap capabilities worked as well as you wanted, etc. I'm assuming the Promise may be at a disadvantage what with its 32-bit PCI slot (even though it can run at 66MHz, I haven't found a board with 66MHz standard PCI slots) when compared to its PCI-X competitors, but I don't know how much of one. I hope to get a board with gig ethernet already onboard so that little if anything else rides the PCI bus. Thanks for any advice.
 
Definitly no on the Promise controller; I've only had experience with an LSI Megaraid SATA 4 and a Highpoint Rocketraid 1520, but both seemed like good cards. I prefer LSI's BIOS to highpoint's, however
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Definitly no on the Promise controller; I've only had experience with an LSI Megaraid SATA 4 and a Highpoint Rocketraid 1520, but both seemed like good cards. I prefer LSI's BIOS to highpoint's, however
Click to expand...
Strange...
I've always had pretty good luck with the Promise controlers for RAID 0/1 or just as an alternative to an integrated controler. I've had problems with the Highpoints.

I was looking at the LSI MegaRAID 150-6 too.
Just can't come off the wallet right now though. :(

 
Highpoint=good, reliable, but cheap.

For RAID5, try to find something with a hardware XOR engine. I don't like Highpoint because I don't think any of their stuff uses one.
I think Promise's S150 SX4 has it.
 
mavalpha said:
Highpoint=good, reliable, but cheap.

For RAID5, try to find something with a hardware XOR engine. I don't like Highpoint because I don't think any of their stuff uses one.
I think Promise's S150 SX4 has it.
Click to expand...
Ahh, was under the impression that the SX-4 didn't have a hardware XOR. Just checked the specs, and indeed it does. That changes my recommendation
 
at one point the SX-4 wasnt exactly a dedicated XOR RISC like on my SX6000
they where calling it a RAID Engine for awhile
now they are calling it a processor, not sure if that was an actual change or what

Femme Taken had it in a roundup back in Jan 2004
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/400

seems to me that there are some additional features now
but then I didnt breakout the translator and compare then with now either


maybe thats what they are calling the SX4060 now
Instead of adding a costly CPU to the controller, Promise's FastTrak SX4060 controller uses an integrated XOR engine for parity calculations
Click to expand...

and the SATA original had....?
 
All of them have some sort of hardware XOR processing. Promise bills theirs as "hardware assisted RAID" though unlike the others which claim to have a full onboard processor.
 
Really? I always thought HighPoint used software-based RAID, not in the sense of needing special Windows utilities tow ork, but regarding dependence on the CPU to do the parity calculations.

Indeed, check out Tom's review, way back when.
In our tests, the RocketRAID 1820 delivered decent transfer performance. The lack of a hardware XOR unit becomes noticeable when running the application benchmark in Winbench 99 2.0. HighPoint brings up the rear in this discipline. But, as already mentioned, it wasn't intended for this type of application.
Click to expand...
IOW, that's DEFINITELY a card to avoid if you are planning on running RAID5. (That's my take, anyway.)
 
It looks as though you're right; the fancy wording seems a little deceiving. Which means that so far, the LSI looks like the best choice with the Adaptec coming in second.
 
i have the promise SX4-M running on the DELL SC420 (32-bit PCI slot; celeron 2.xx; 512MB; 4 x Samsung SP1614C in RAID5) and I am somewhat disappointed with the performance. In most benches on my system, the single maxtor boot drive outperforms the 4 disk array. Maybe it is my system that sucks....*shrugs* who knows
 
LOL
its in RAID 5 those parity calculations have to get done
its write performance is going to take a hit over a single drive

what size oncard cache do you have?
is the typical access smaller or larger than that?
Do your benchmarks reflect your typical access?
 
Just so I am clear as I am looking to do sort of the same thing as the thread owner.. I will be buying one of these cards also probably the LSI, do these cards allow you to swap to a different machine if the machine itself dies? Will a 1.8ghz with a gig of ram support the cards? Also how can you tell which drive dies when youve got them in RAID5. I would hate to take out a working drive and lose everything. Thanks for the help!
 
migration is generally as simple as loading the card and array into another machine and adding its driver

RAM & CPU are largely immaterial, these cards have their own CPUs to do the RAID5 calculations and their own memory caches

all these cards come with a software management utility that will report the array staus and even alert you in various ways (email popup ect) to any change to its status (even SMART parameters in some cases), it will ID the bad drive and if you set it up with an attached hot spare automatically rebuild the array without user intervention
 
my personal feelings are that hotspares shouldnt be employed outside of the constant access senerio
if there is a warm body around to swap it out and timing isnt critical the advantage of an extra stripe to the storage efficiency ratio (number of drives minus one) especially with a 4 channel array, outweights the advantages of the hotspare

of course if its set to image a sever in the middle of the night and there is no warmbody.....
 
Tyklfe said:
Might I direct you here?
Click to expand...

LOL

we are now up 3 links saying Femme Taken is the guy you want to reference
only this time its in English ;)

thanx I hadnt seen that and missed it in my first link as I dont read dutch very well :p


hmmm...that Areca ARC-1120 is interesting didnt know about those
 
Ice Czar said:
hmmm...that Areca ARC-1120 is interesting didnt know about those
Click to expand...
Yep, I posted a thread about them a while ago. They do look pretty nice, especially since you don't need a super-high end motherboard to use the pci-E versions. That's what I'm looking forward to. :D
 
Even better, Tekram appears to remarket them. I've never heard of Areca (other than reviews) but Tekram isn't that hard to find, and they carry the new PCIe versions as well. Looks like they also remarket some of LSI's gear.
 
unhappy_mage said:
since you don't need a super-high end motherboard to use the pci-E versions.
Click to expand...

ah but once youve got PCI-X replacing it aint so fun :p
 
LoneWolf said:
Even better, Tekram appears to remarket them. I've never heard of Areca (other than reviews) but Tekram isn't that hard to find, and they carry the new PCIe versions as well. Looks like they also remarket some of LSI's gear.
Click to expand...
The areca versions are actually the originals, Tekram's are actually slower. According to some site I read a while ago and promptly lost the link for, anyways. I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about these cards. ;)

If only I had a job... :rolleyes:
 
For the price I'm very satisfied with a Rocketraid 1820a + Supermicro P4SCT+II (64 bit PCI-X) + 4x Hitachi 7K400 400GB drives. This combination has worked out very well for my personal file server. Multiple computers can access it at the same time without bogging it down (unlike the other raid 5 array in the server, which I'll get into). Over a gigabit network, my main rigs raid 0 74gb raptor setup writes and pulls data from the server at a solid 60mbps. The cpu utilization when writing over the network look to be 25-30% on a P4 3.0e and is in the low single digits while reading data. This setup hasn't given me any problems in its 6 month use. I'm looking foward to adding another 400gb to hit the 2gb limit even though this controller will require the array to be rebuilt.

The other raid 5 array in that server is 8x 160gb IDE Maxtors on a PCI Rocketraid 454. It is an utter disappointment compared to the other array. Uploads to it go at a piddly 11mbps rate and the server reports 45-50% cpu usage! Writing to it from the sata array is also painfully slow. The read rate isn't bad though, 60-65mbps to my raptors like the other array and it caps out the pci bus at 90mbps on the server itself. I haven't tested this enough but it seems multiple computers can't access this array without severely hurting the read rate. Lightly accessing the drive while streaming an xvid movie was enough to render it unwatchable with 1-2 second stutters. I'm thinking about moving these drives to another machine dedicated to them to see if it likes a cpu of its own.
 
Romir said:
For the price I'm very satisfied with a Rocketraid 1820a + Supermicro P4SCT+II (64 bit PCI-X) + 4x Hitachi 7K400 400GB drives. This combination has worked out very well for my personal file server. Multiple computers can access it at the same time without bogging it down (unlike the other raid 5 array in the server, which I'll get into). Over a gigabit network, my main rigs raid 0 74gb raptor setup writes and pulls data from the server at a solid 60mbps. The cpu utilization when writing over the network look to be 25-30% on a P4 3.0e and is in the low single digits while reading data. This setup hasn't given me any problems in its 6 month use. I'm looking foward to adding another 400gb to hit the 2gb limit even though this controller will require the array to be rebuilt.

The other raid 5 array in that server is 8x 160gb IDE Maxtors on a PCI Rocketraid 454. It is an utter disappointment compared to the other array. Uploads to it go at a piddly 11mbps rate and the server reports 45-50% cpu usage! Writing to it from the sata array is also painfully slow. The read rate isn't bad though, 60-65mbps to my raptors like the other array and it caps out the pci bus at 90mbps on the server itself. I haven't tested this enough but it seems multiple computers can't access this array without severely hurting the read rate. Lightly accessing the drive while streaming an xvid movie was enough to render it unwatchable with 1-2 second stutters. I'm thinking about moving these drives to another machine dedicated to them to see if it likes a cpu of its own.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a nice setup overall, my only question is, why the RAID-0 raptors on a file server?!
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Sounds like a nice setup overall, my only question is, why the RAID-0 raptors on a file server?!
Click to expand...
Sorry for not being very clear, those raid-0 raptors are in a desktop. The server has the OS on a single WD36D.
 
Romir said:
Sorry for not being very clear, those raid-0 raptors are in a desktop. The server has the OS on a single WD36D.
Click to expand...
Ahh, sorry, that was my misreading; re-read it and it made sense this time ;)
 
For the longest time Adaptec made the best RAID controllers on the planet. I don't know if they still do or not, but just because that's what I have always used that's the one I would recommend.
 
I just built a 4x300GB SATA RAID-5 array using the Promise card and let me be the first to warn you: if you are planning on using the 915 Intel chipset, steer clear of this card. Their drivers do not support 915 (and possibly above). I learned this the hard way. Windows could not find the hard drives NO MATTER WHAT. I was installing Win2k3 Standard. So then curiosity took over and I tried with XP, 2000 Server, and finally Red Hat 9. Surprisingly, only Promise's Linux drivers worked with 915 chipsets and saw the four drives.

Magically, when I dropped down to a Springdale (865 chipset) Windows found all the drives there. So I've been running a 900GB useable array on the Springdale for a couple weeks and havent had many complaints since. No benchmarks to back that up, but be aware if your P4 system you are planning to build is running the 915 chipset before going with the Promise controller.

I contacted Promise about this and they acted like I was an idiot, like "did you press F6 when starting the Windows install" so after i went off on them they sent me some bogus beta driver that didnt work either.
 
I've got about a half dozen of the Promise and a half dozen of the Highpoints installed....

The Promise works great 24/7. No issues with any of them... ever.

But I had clearance issues with SuperMicro 4U rackmount cases, so I looked at the Highpoint. It's smaller and... what the heck.. it costs less!

EVERY SINGLE HIGHPOINT I have installed has hiccuped. Since all of these RAID-5's are in fairly critical environements, so each hiccup is duly noted by the powers that be.

The systems will slow down to the point where only a reboot will cure the problem.

I'll mysteriously "lose a drive." On reboot, the drive is re-discovered.

The systems will simply "hang" and nobody can access the servers.

My boss has since explained to me that the use of Highpoint RAID cards in the future will mean my job, and any service call I do that has anything to do with a Highpoint RAID card will require replacing the Highpoint with a Promise, and if there is clearance issues I will be expected to migrate the hardware over to a larger case.

No shit. THAT'S how bad they are.
 
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