What RAID card to use?

I

IceTea

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Jul 28, 2007
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So I'm building myself a new file server, and I was planning on using a dedicated RAID controller this time. But I need some help deciding wich one.
I'm stuck between these models:
Highpoint RocketRaid 2340
or
The Areca ARC-1231ML

Situation:
I'm looking for good performance in RAID5 setups probably 2 * 6 drives. I've tried an onboard solution, as a test, in the past, and it was WAY to slow to be an option (it capped at 50mbit/sec). That and the obvious lack of connecitons made me look at better cards.
I know the areca is about the best one can get, but it's price (€800) is double that of the highpoint (€400) with less connections. And what I've heard of highpoint in the past doesn't really help.
So I'm asking you guys, can the highpoint cut it on a gigabit network, or is the areca really worth it's money? (it's a long lasting investment, but it's still damned expensive)

Any questions about the rest of the system system, or if you got any other hints and tips, fire away.

PS my apologies in case of crappy english here and there.
 
50 megabit or megabyte? That does seem awfully slow, in either case.

The Highpoint does pretty well in raid 5. Take a look at Tweakers.net's review of raid controllers. The 2340 is based on the same core as the 1820a listed there. If you're looking to save some money, I think you'll be okay going with the 2340.

However, it really depends on what you mean by "file server". What kind of thing do you want to store on it? How might you access a file in a typical usage scenario? Why is gigabit performance important to you?
 
50 megabit yes, it was terrible for some reason. This was during writing, wich is slower but still. For that machine however it was unacceptable so I didn't even bother with write testing and just went to raid 10. That could write over 200megabit/s.

Thanks for the review, I've been googling only for these 2 cards, so I must have missed it.
Well, the server will be used as image and media server. If I read the review correctly, a highpoint should be sufficient. The extra CPU load shouldn't be a problem, I'm using a dual core, and there aren't any CPU intensive operations on that server anyway.

Usually the load is pretty low, but when I need to restore several PC's at once, and install some software on them off this server, it's usually pretty urgent (NOT life threatening though) , and I'd like to get it done ASAP.
 
So far I got all the server's hardware, exept the RAID card, running tests.
The nVidia onboard RAID is acting up. The second I try anything on the array ( creating a partition ), it say one of the drives dropped. Fiddling with the cables makes the drive show up, but it thinks it's in another (identical) array... it might also be because of the following:

Since I'm trying to put 6 * 500GB drives in RAID 0, basic windows XP can't handle it anymore. I've read about GPT or 64k clusters coupled with dynamic drives as solutions. I don't really like dynamic drives, but I also prefer windows XP, then again the 64 bit version has pretty lousy driver support. What's recomended, and are there any alternatives?

--Edit--
just tested the speeds with a 5 * 500GB array I made:
Writing happens at an average of 4000kbytes/sec, or 32mbit/sec, still horrendous. with about 5% CPU use.
It takes me about 30 minutes to copy a 9GB file, and I've got about 2TB of data to be transferred.
As for read speeds, I'm not waiting 30 minutes to test them ....
 
IceTea said:
So I'm building myself a new file server, and I was planning on using a dedicated RAID controller this time. But I need some help deciding wich one.
I'm stuck between these models:
Highpoint RocketRaid 2340
or
The Areca ARC-1231ML
Click to expand...


Since it's just a file server, and not other things, I'd say the highpoint will be plenty fine for your needs. Gigabit networking at a theoretical maximum 100% efficiency (which doesn't exist..) , would afford you 120megs a second, and with (if I read you right) 2 seperate 6 drive raid 5s, there should be no reason you can't approach those numbers, assuming the drives in question are peppy (say, 7200rpm, 16mb 7200.10s, or raptor150s, etc.. but not 4200 rpm laptop harddrives ...)

Realistic throughput requirements of a Gigabit network would mean you'd only need to supply 80 megs a second, since I've never seen a gig network card that actually throughput anywhere near it's supposed theoretical maximum

However, if you were looking to use it for more than just file serving purposes (or, if it's a BUNCH of concurrent accesses, like, in excess of 100..) I'd suggest the areca, because it has more capability (including the one thing you overlooked - it can have onboard memory - up to 2 gb - I do not believe the highpoint can)



--Edit--
just tested the speeds with a 5 * 500GB array I made:
Writing happens at an average of 4000kbytes/sec, or 32mbit/sec, still horrendous. with about 5% CPU use.
It takes me about 30 minutes to copy a 9GB file, and I've got about 2TB of data to be transferred.
As for read speeds, I'm not waiting 30 minutes to test them ....
Click to expand...
[/quote]
With performance numbers like this, I'd say there's something WRONG with your server. DMA isn't on right, etc.. There's no way it should be anywhere near that slow. It should be doing at LEAST 5x faster, and that'd still be horrible performance.
 
Just tried the same thing to the same drives in a RAID 10 array with 3 drives.
This is a single file transfer (8 gigabytes) comming from a 4 drive RAID 0 array.
Write speeds are between 22 and 25 Mbytes per sec.

Since I removed the rack (that was apparently failing that one drive) I've tried that RAID 5 result again, this is with only 5 drives since I'm still using good ol' XP.
Write speeds are around 4Mbytes and occasionally bursting up to 7ish, taskmanager shows a fairly consistent 4% network usage, with the occasional spike/drop.

This is using the onboard nVidia controller of a 570SLI chipset, and is what I have observed in the past. I was a bit scared that most host based controllers would show similar performance.
 
I love my Areca card with a passion, in retrospect I should have saved a bit more money and bought a 16 or 24 port card for future usage instead of thinking "8 drives, how the hell could I possibly use all those up!". With the Areca I would think that you would have absolutely no challenge whatsoever consuming a gigabit link. I get 150-220mb/s writes in raid6 with 8x 320gb WD RE's (It's been a while since I've done testing and the tests have varied, doing a full 1.8tb test I never had the time for to fully graph it).

For reference:
Code: 
puffy ~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=1gbfile bs=512k count=2048
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.57401 s, 193 MB/s
puffy ~ # dd if=1gbfile of=/dev/null bs=512k
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.12008 s, 344 MB/s
puffy ~ # df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4             1.8T  1.3T  353G  79% /
udev                 1005M  264K 1005M   1% /dev
/dev/sda3             9.4G  1.3G  8.1G  14% /usr/portage
shm                  1005M     0 1005M   0% /dev/shm

If you have any plans to possibly go bigger, or want to go performance in your workstation later I'd suggest the Areca. If you end up going with the Areca and are installing Linux, http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Areca is something I started up and is fairly up to date, mostly gentoo specific.
 
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