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Raid 5 Here I Come

J

jawpaul

n00b
Joined
Mar 6, 2007
Messages
51
Well I am finally embarking on my personal endevour into RAID 5.

I went the budget route.
Total Cost was about $570

4 * 500 GB sata drives
Datoptic qBOX-M external infiniband Enclosure
Dell Perc 5/E controller

Hopefully get some good speeds out of it :D
 
Been running RAID5 for several months now. Absolutely wonderful. hardware RAID is the best. Enjoy yours.
 
Thanks,

This is going to be used for video editing.I'm hoping to see some good speed from it.

The external enclosure should be in today. I'll set things up tonight, transfer over my old data and hopefully do some tests this weekend.

I'll do a mini-review on the setup if anyone is interested.
 
I'm interested. Might be doing something similar myself.
 
Please post your results with the Perc 5/e

I ran a Perc 5/e and an Adaptec 3405/8 and I must say the Perc 5/e performed horribly against the other two. This was using Samsung 300GB Sas 15k drives (4 and 8 drive arrays, in both Raid 0 and Raid 5)
 
The Perc 5 is more of a budget hardware raid card. It's not slow, but it's not blistering speed either. It still lags behind others in the write speed department but does very well on reads.
 
Pocatello said:
just curious... why the PERC 5?
Click to expand...

Because it's a true hardware RAID card with support for 8 SATA drives that you can find on eBay for around $120. Hence its popularity considering that a new true hardware RAID card wtih 4 SATA ports costs around $300.
 
The reason I picked the Perc 5 because it is a true bargain.

I payed $50 + 9 shipping from ebay used guaranteed no DOA.

The Perc 5e is a rebadged LSI 8480E
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/pro...id/megaraid_sas/megaraid_sas_8480e/index.html

Reason 2 I chose the Perc 5/E was because I wanted an external array due to limited internal space (4 *3.5", 4 * 5 1/4"). The Perc 5/E was the cheapest card to also provide INFINIBAND connectors.


I'm migrating my old RAID-0 array data over tonight(Symantec Ghost), and will then add in the old disks and do an online migration to a 4 drive RAID 5 array.

First Impressions:
Its annoying to find drivers for the Perc 5/E card.
The datoptic enclosure is a good value. Quiet (so far), includes the Infiniband cable ($60 elsewhere), included everything I needed also. Documentation was non-existent. The internal SATA cables are not labeled, and only one of the drive access LED's was plugged up. The case is plain looking. Plastic front door is a little cheap feeling/looking. The inside was a lil cramped when installing the hard drives and cabling.

Here is someone else's review of the Datoptic Enclosure.
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/datoptic/qboxm/
This review is nearly 2 years old. Instead of having a seperate power/sata plugs for the hard drive mine has a combined plug that also has an output that goes to the drive access LED lights on the front panel. So his first CON/Negative in the review is moot.
 
Still transforming the array from RAID 0 -> Raid 5.... total time for transform ~11 hours.

So far HDTach results:
Integrated Raid 0 - 2 * 500gb
Random Access: 18.5ms
Average Read: 116.5mb/s
Burst Speed: 181mb/s

Perc 5/E Raid 0 - 2 * 500gb
Random Access: 14.4ms
Average Read: 110.5mb/s
Burst Speed: 433mb/s

Perc 5/E Raid 0 - 2 * 500gb with UPDATE LSI fw
Random Access: 14.2ms
Average Read: 132.6mb/s
Burst Speed: 512mb/s

Updating the firmware made a BIG difference.
 
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