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Need help w/ RAID 5 controller choices

S

SB22

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 21, 2003
Messages
1,141
I own an Adaptec 2400A RAID card that is currently in our storage server. I have heard people say that they are "flaky." I'm not really sure what the means, but we've recently had major problems with our storage server w/ rebuilding the RAID 5 after 1 of the drives died. Everything was lost and we're starting from scratch.

Basically my main question was, we are looking for another RAID card for another server (RAID 5 compatable w/ minimum 4 devices). I wanted some suggestions from people who have used them. The two cards i've beel looking at are:

Promise FastTrack SX4000
Adaptec 2400A (another one)

I'm open to any other suggestions as long as they support RAID 5 , and i also wanted to know the difference between the Promise FastTrack SX4000 and the SX4000Lite. There was a small price difference, but from a quick glance at the specs i wasn't sure of the benefits of going from one card or another.

These cards are being used for small business servers, but need to be reliable b/c we have valuable data that we store on the RAID arrays. Thanks guys in advance, i appreciate it:cool:
 
I would agree that the 2400A is flaky. I sold mine mainly for that reason, though I didn't pick up anything else afterwards. You probably already know that you have two obvious choices: SX4000/6000 or 3Ware in 4/8/12 channel configs. Don't know the difference in SX4000/SX4000Lite (actually, hadn't heard of the Lite).
 
I checked out the 3Ware 7506-4LP. Sounds like another good alternative, althought it is abotu $100 more then the Promise SX4000. Anyone think of a reason why it's worth spending the extra $$ for the 3ware card, if not then i think i'll go with the SX4000 since i don't really need the 6 channels of the SX 6000.

And again, anyone know any differences between the SX4000 and SX4000lite? Thanks :cool:
 
well Ive been running an SX6000 for over three years
but then I havent needed to rebuild it either, nor is it on a server, it connected to a workstation (several in the period of three years)

the SX4000 rocks on a 32bit\66MHz bus w\ 256MB of SDRAM
but then again so do the 3ware Escalades
 
I'm definatly set on the SX4000 i think.

Here's sort of a comparison between the SX4000 and SX4000lite: link

The differences i see are that the Lite version supports RAID 0+1 but not RAID 10, and the regular version supports RAID 10 but not RAID 0+1. The Lite version also says it's for "server" operating systems, and i've often seen it advertised for Server 2003/XP/2000. I would love to run it with Server 2003, we're switching out systems over to that anyway.

I guess i'm just skeptical b/c "lite" in my mind usually means worse then the regular model. The price is also cheaper, that's why it leads me to think this even more. I'm thinking the Lite edition is the one i want b/c i will most likely use 0+1 before i would use RAID 10 (but my main intensions are to run RAID 5 only), and also b/c it's advertised for Windows Server 2003.

Anyone else have more input between the two and what they suggest i should get?
 
I am currently running (4) 160GB Maxtor drives RAID 5 on a Promise 4000SX controller, so far no problems on a Dell Poweredge 600SC.

The only thing I can say is that the boot time is a bit slower than using 2003's built in OS mirroring on a pair of 160GB drives, but I haven't had the time to "tweak" any settings or measure performance just yet.
 
According to Promise's specs, the main difference in the Lite is that it supports only 32-bit/33MHz PCI whereas the original SX4000 supports up to 32-bit/66MHz PCI. If you don't have any 66MHz slots and don't plan on going that route, I guess you may as well use a Lite.

Regarding 10 vs 0+1, it's just different in that 10 is mirrored, then striped... 0+1 is striped, then mirrored. I am not particularly familiar with the performance differences between the two, but I have heard there are some slight differences.
 
I have a Promise SX4000 with three (3) WD 120gb IDE drives and it's working flawlessly. When I first set it up I went ahead tested the RAID 5. I turned off and pulled (drives are in hot swap carriers) one of the drives while the system was running. It didn't skip a beat. Promise software reported a drive was down and kept chuggin along. Put the drive back in and ran the utlility to initialize the array. Man did this take forever but worked great.

P.S. If you run the SX4000 under Windows2003 then be sure to download the beta driver from Promise's site. My performance sucked bad at first until I used this beta driver.
 
Alright, well i'm set on the Promise SX4000 now (seems to be the best choice in my situation). I had one more question though. We're buying two of these cards, but one of them is going in a pretty old system (P3 500). Has anyone had problems with these cards and older systems?

The reason i ask this is because of the review that was left for this product over at NewEgg said this:

I bought this controller planning to use it with a 4 or 5 year old motherboard. The Raid card refused to do anything. Use this card with only new hardware or be prepared to have lots of headaches.
Click to expand...

Just thought i'd ask if anyone else had any experience w/ the card and older mobo's.
 
For our IDE solutions at work we use 3ware cards. Just started getting in SATA versions of their cards and so far its the same as the IDE controllers but just Serial (duh). The 3ware has two fatal flaws in my mind.

1) Its still a software level of Raid 5 (Raid 10) in a sense. The card does not have a onboard XOR processor so your parity calculations are left to the CPU which means CPU cycles on your part. So if this is going to be a simple samba/nfs server and nothing else then its fine.

2) 3ware has recently identified a bug in their older code effecting rebuilding of raid 5 devices. I my opinion this is serve and I have seen issues where it also causes a box to just lock up. We have a few PATA versions of the cards and from time to time they just seem to lock up. So FYI... Its been so bad sometimes that the OS thinks its disk is corrupt and it really isnt but it takes a system reboot to fix it.
 
Have any of you seen reviews on the SX4000 with new hard drives? I have seen reviews on the SX6000 and they say that after you have 4 hard drives, the performance increase for RAID0 or RAID5 plateau's. I was looking to get a couple of hard drives this summer /w a SX6000 or SX4000 in a RAID5 setup, but if the performance plateau's after 4 hard drives, there is no reason to get more than a 4 channel card. (i.e. no performance increase ... i'm guessing because the bus)
 
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