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RAID 5 controller for DFI mobo

C

civic00typer

Gawd
Joined
Dec 5, 2003
Messages
517
I need want to add RAID 5 support for my new file server that I am buidling. Currently my board supports, PCI, PCIe x1 x4 x16. Can I used a PCI-X RAID controller? What is the trade off by putting a PCI-X controller card into a regular PCI slot? Thanks!
 
Pci-X is not the same as pci express (pciE for the rest of this post). You can get a pciE raid controller - Areca makes a nice one in x8 - and put it in; several people have reported success with this. Pci-X is a server thing. pciE is the next generation interconnect for everyone. It's 2 Gbit/s/lane, so an x8 slot is up to 16Gbit/s*. That means you only need an x4 slot for 10gigE, for example. There's so much bandwidth with pciE that it should last a while. Especially if/when motherboards start incorporating several full x16 slots. :drool:

You can usually put a pciX raid card in a normal pci slot, albeit at reduced speed. That's the only disadvantage, though; it works fine, and up to 133 MB/s.

*Yes, it's 2.5 gbit. There's 8/10b coding in it, like many other peripherals these days, so the data rate is 2.0. There are other things in the protocol which slow it down, though, so don't expect 250 MB/s transfers over a single lane.

 
My friend has a promise sata raid 5 controller on the 4x PCIe between the cpu and first video card slot (DFI lan party ut ultra d). It works quite well for him so far although the had to trim a bit some of the bottom fins on his zalman cpns 7000 cooler to make it fit.

Also his controller has an xor chip chip so its hardware raid which is far better that sofware (less cpu overhead and no need for extra drivers).

I'll ask him tonight what model he has and post it.
 
Thanks, I guess I will go with the PCIe raid controller. The big question is which one, hardware or software Raid 5. The price difference is large!
 
Neutrino said:
My friend has a promise sata raid 5 controller on the 4x PCIe between the cpu and first video card slot (DFI lan party ut ultra d). It works quite well for him so far although the had to trim a bit some of the bottom fins on his zalman cpns 7000 cooler to make it fit.

Also his controller has an xor chip chip so its hardware raid which is far better that sofware (less cpu overhead and no need for extra drivers).

I'll ask him tonight what model he has and post it.
Click to expand...
Promise SuperTrak EX8350?
 
civic00typer said:
Thanks, I guess I will go with the PCIe raid controller. The big question is which one, hardware or software Raid 5. The price difference is large!
Click to expand...


IMO as i said in my earlier post hardware raid is the way to go. You free up the cpu from doing all the work and you don't have to deal with drivers (no more F6 when you start up windows).

EnderW said:
Promise SuperTrak EX8350?
Click to expand...


looking at the specs it might be but i won't be sure till I ask him.
 
Neutrino said:
IMO as i said in my earlier post hardware raid is the way to go. You free up the cpu from doing all the work and you don't have to deal with drivers (no more F6 when you start up windows).
Click to expand...
The driver thing's gonna have to happen either way, but it's just when you install windows, not when you start up. Any storage controller that isn't included with windows XP (that pretty much knocks out SATA) is gonna need one.

 
Okay... well I have a 3000+ 939 dedicated to file sharing, do you think the software raid overhead will be more than that chip can handle?
 
unhappy_mage said:
The driver thing's gonna have to happen either way, but it's just when you install windows, not when you start up. Any storage controller that isn't included with windows XP (that pretty much knocks out SATA) is gonna need one.
Click to expand...


actually no. At least with some hardware raid controllers you won't need any drivers when you install windows. As far as the OS in concerned all it sees is one big drive. This was the case with my friend's controller sata raid 5 and if you don't belive me look up the build for maximum pc's dream machine. They mention that with their raid 5 controller card no drivers were necessary.

civic00typer said:
Okay... well I have a 3000+ 939 dedicated to file sharing, do you think the software raid overhead will be more than that chip can handle?
Click to expand...


if its a dedicated file server then losing some cpu cycles is no big thing. In your regular usage computer that would be bothersome to lose some performance to that, but if its dedicated who cares. So yeah the 3000+ will more than adequate.

This might be a factor though: reliability. I don'y know if there is much of a difference between a software and hardware controller in this category.
 
They used a NetCell, which I would never in a million years consider. It's as locked-in as they come, and it's raid 3 - all the parity on one disk. That means that disk is practically guaranteed to wear out before the others do. Certainly it leads to lower latencies; less disks have to wait for the disk to finish turning to the proper spot.

But my point is, with an onboard controller like a Silicon Image or ICH* or Marvell, you need a driver disk. The Netcell uses a (IMO dirty) trick to not need drivers - it emulates a simpler PATA controller, so the OS doesn't need to have drivers for Netcell, just whatever card they emulate. Source here; find in page "driverless". This is an icky way to do things, and hides functionality from the OS. It's like using a bridge on all your sata devices.



edit: OP a 3000+ is overkill for a dedicated server. A p3-933 can handle 2 GB/s of raid 5 calculations; the bottleneck is always pci bus bandwidth, and pciE will obviously remove a lot of that.
 
unhappy_mage said:
They used a NetCell, which I would never in a million years consider. It's as locked-in as they come, and it's raid 3 - all the parity on one disk. That means that disk is practically guaranteed to wear out before the others do. Certainly it leads to lower latencies; less disks have to wait for the disk to finish turning to the proper spot.

But my point is, with an onboard controller like a Silicon Image or ICH* or Marvell, you need a driver disk. The Netcell uses a (IMO dirty) trick to not need drivers - it emulates a simpler PATA controller, so the OS doesn't need to have drivers for Netcell, just whatever card they emulate. Source here; find in page "driverless". This is an icky way to do things, and hides functionality from the OS. It's like using a bridge on all your sata devices.
Click to expand...



oh yeah you are right the maximum pc was a raid 3 controller, ah well i was just using it as an example of driverless card.

And i personally really don't see any disadvantages to leaving all the raid 5 duties to the card (as long as is of good quality of course). Those promise 4x pcie sata raid5 cards are also driverless and usually promise is known for good quality controllers.

and of course those onboard controllers require drivers, they have no hardware acceleration and have to basically rely on the OS/cpu to take care of the array. They are pretty much sofware raid 5.
 
Survey says yeah, sorta. The Highpoint 2320 is an 8 port card for $260, and though it uses software-based RAID algorithms, it's still got decent performance.

Surprisingly, I haven't asked this yet - what OS are you using for this project? The HPT has Linux drivers, if I understand properly, but binary-only. They work, though, so I guess it depends where you fall on the practical <-> purist scale.

 
that tho is for sata2 drives.

i think alot of people are curious as to whawt normal motherboard users should use.

we see options for pci-x which is the majority of cards, then their are about 1/2 dozen pci, but pci is very limited in bandwidth right?

so for users of new sli boards or non server motherboards, what exactly can you do for raid 5?

are pci cards still okay for personal servers or what?
 
For practical "will this work" problems, sata1 == sata2. There's technically a speed difference, NCQ, and some other things, but nothing that'll make it stop working.

I'd stay away from pci raid cards; the raid implementations are usually pretty weak. PCI-X cards will mostly work in pci slots, try one of those. The only exception I can think of is the newest 3wares.

 
unhappy_mage said:
For practical "will this work" problems, sata1 == sata2. There's technically a speed difference, NCQ, and some other things, but nothing that'll make it stop working.

I'd stay away from pci raid cards; the raid implementations are usually pretty weak. PCI-X cards will mostly work in pci slots, try one of those. The only exception I can think of is the newest 3wares.

Click to expand...

but if you put PCI-X card into a PCI slot u run at the slowre speeds, so in that case what would be the point?

So if i got a SATA2 card and ran SATA1 harddrives no problem? I would really like to keep the platforms the same(sata to sata).
 
Yeah, they'll work fine. The reason to get a pci-X card as opposed to a pci one is the pci-X ones are designed for server use, so they have more robust hardware, and are usually faster. The PCI bus isn't as much of a limit with hardware raid; you can only get 133 MB/s over it, but that's not much of a limitation.

 
Pci Express all the way, if you can afford it. PCI-X can potentially be cheaper, but in this instance it's probably worth it if you're interested in getting full speed with no hassles. You can probably get plenty of speed out of a pci-X card, but even so you're stuck with a deadend technology. I don't forsee many more PCI-X HBAs coming out.

 
Is the parity calculation for a Raid 5 array even going to stress a 3000+ 939 with 1GB or ram? I am not going to be using the machine, it is only going to serve as a file server and perhaps some sort of web/ftp/media server. I will have to google some topics and see what I come up with, I will post back if I find anything about parity calculations on modern cpu's.
 
I can give you some:
Code: 
raid5: automatically using best checksumming function: pIII_sse
   pIII_sse  :  1888.000 MB/sec
Total of 2 processors: 930.856 MHz
Code: 
raid5: automatically using best checksumming function: pIII_sse
   pIII_sse  :  2764.000 MB/sec
Total of 1 processor: 2406.432 MHz
I think that pretty much says it. 2xp3 933, 1xp4 2.4.

In case that doesn't say enough for you, no it won't stress it. Badly programmed drivers can keep the system busy waiting for I/O, and that will tie up *plenty* of cpu, but on my Linux box it doesn't even use 1% cpu for writing at full speed.

edit: Really, really big. Some things don't deal well with over 2TB, but once you deal with that, something like 2^64 bytes is the limit.

 
2^64 = 16777216 TB ... so what you are saying is 320*8 - 1 for raid 5 will be approx 2.1 TB formatted, and that will not be a problem for the array?
 
Thanks, I think my decision is made up... besides its just for home use anyways. I really wanted to go crazy, but I guess the difference isn't going to be noticble. I looked at one review @ toms and the highpoint rocketraid actually crashed... problematic card... I think this is the only card that supported pcie in the budget price range.
 
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