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03-06-2008, 10:50 AM #1Web Hosting Evangelist
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How can i judge if the raid card and chip is powerful enough?
Hi,
for a hosting server,many parts of the hardware are all important,
and some part may effect the performance and price,
i just wonder two part,
how can i judge if the raid card and chip is powerful enough to run a hosting server?
thanks
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03-06-2008, 09:17 PM #2WHT Addict
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It all depends on the load placed on the server. Generally speaking you'll want to go with a true hardware RAID card like the ones from 3Ware. You really can't go wrong with their cards. If anything, your bottleneck will be with the disks and not the actual card. Just get a decent true hardware RAID card and enterprise level drives. I would recommend against using desktop drives in a server if you'll have any type of real load on the server.
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03-06-2008, 10:09 PM #3Web Hosting Master
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"Enterprise level" classified drives is mostly for suckers with too much money.
Sure, higher RPM drives are very important for performance. But, the "enterprise" classifications tends to deal more with MBTF issues and is mostly marketing fluff.Daved @ Lightwave Networking, LLC.
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03-08-2008, 11:12 PM #4Web Hosting Evangelist
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Hi,
thanks to all.
a)yes,i know adding the hard raid card will be better,instead of onboard or soft.
a)as usual,how can i judge the level of raid card and motherboard?
from the chip ? or ?
thanks
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03-09-2008, 12:24 AM #5Web Hosting Master
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Try to look for dedicated XOR chip and/or memory on the controller. Some controllers don't have a chip to do the RAID calculations and do mostly in hardware. Typically anything under $100 in cost will be software driven.
Depending on the OS, you may want something that's pretty well established and coded for such as megaraid or mptbase. Those will typically have a BIOS and the OS will recognize them no problem.
I recommend 3ware controllers, they have pretty good support among Linux and Windows flavors.TailorMadeServers.Com - Dallas Dedicated Servers since 2003
joseq@tailormadeservers.com | Skype (TailorMadeServers) | http://twitter.com/tailoredservers
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03-09-2008, 02:25 AM #6Web Hosting Evangelist
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Hi,TMS - JoseQ,
thanks for your post.
a)about 3ware and Adaptec,which will be better?
b)about the motherboard or the chip on motherboard,do you have any suggestion?
thanks
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03-09-2008, 02:54 AM #7Aspiring Evangelist
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We use alot of these, they have ran good for us.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Tpk=16-116-043http://www.realwebhost.net
http://www.realwebhost.net/vps.php
ICQ 120397604 |MSN : hotmail.com | AIM : rwhsupport | Yahoo: rwhmax
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03-09-2008, 03:28 AM #8Web Host
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These are perfect
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816116030
2 port, RAID 1 and they run rock solid. A cutting edge RAID card could end up not having proper Kernel support. It's better to get one thats been on the market for about a year.
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03-09-2008, 03:35 AM #9Aspiring Evangelist
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We just used 3 of those last week.
http://www.realwebhost.net
http://www.realwebhost.net/vps.php
ICQ 120397604 |MSN : hotmail.com | AIM : rwhsupport | Yahoo: rwhmax
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03-09-2008, 10:46 AM #10WHT Addict
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We use the 3Ware 9650 series cards as well for almost all of our RAID deployments. One thing to point out - you need to get the battery backup unit that is sold separately in order to really get the full performance out of the card. Without it, you cannot use write caching which really slows things down and can also cause your array to get degraded if the server is not shut down properly (ie hard reboots).
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03-26-2008, 11:37 PM #11Junior Guru Wannabe
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We have a mixture or PERC5/6 cards in our servers. They seem to be doing quite well at handling our mixture of 7200 and 15,000RPM Raid 1 setups.
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03-27-2008, 12:16 AM #12Web Hosting Guru
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3ware makes great cards, as said previously. I highly recommend Areca cards if you're putting a lot of drives in your servers, but you will pay a premium for them. Great linux support and rock solid.
██ HermeTek Network Solutions
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██ BSD & Linux consulting, training, and hosting
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03-27-2008, 09:36 AM #13Aspiring Evangelist
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Want to save some money? Running Linux? On a decent new machine (quad-core or dual-proc, dual-core or better)?
Use software RAID. Not a 'software RAID card', I mean pure software RAID. It has numerous advantages over hardware RAID implementations, basically no downsides to hardware RAID (especially when comparing to sub-$500 RAID cards), and won't cost you a dime, thus saving you money.
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03-27-2008, 09:57 AM #14Junior Guru Wannabe
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You can do software RAID in Windows too, but in both cases it puts the RAID load on your processor and memory, rather than on the RAID card's processor and memory.
I have always thought of it as using software when you are going for redundancy, and hardware when you are going for speed.
Just my $0.02[URL="http://www.careermarketplace.com"]
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03-27-2008, 11:02 AM #15Web Hosting Master
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Ugh, software RAID. The whole point of RAID is to improve uptime - if you've got to take the server down to swap a new drive in (I'm not aware of any software RAID that works with hot-swapping) then what's the point?
3Ware 8006-2LP - Performance sucks TBH, about 1/2-2/3 the speed you get from a single drive. The 9650 are a much better choice.Karl Austin :: KDAWS.com
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Partner with us and free-up more time for income generating tasks
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03-27-2008, 11:46 AM #16Web Hosting Master
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so 3ware<areca?
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03-27-2008, 11:55 AM #17Aspiring Evangelist
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If the driver supports hot swapping the drives, software RAID on Linux (md) supports it. There's a process, but there's absolutely no need to turn the server down just to swap a drive assuming its actually a hot swappable drive.
You are indeed putting the RAID load on the processor/memory, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On newer processors and a decent server, the load addition is minimal.. and will be capable of sustaining the RAID at the maximum speed possible.
Higher end RAID cards can have processors and sufficient memory to not be the bottleneck, thus potentially winning a speed war vs software RAID (that point is very arguable, however).. however lower end RAID cards (especially in the more computationally expensive RAID5 or with lots of spindles) more often than not ARE the bottleneck (not really arguable.. its the rare sub-$500 card that isn't the bottleneck).
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03-27-2008, 02:14 PM #18Web Hosting Master
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Adaptec just rolled out 5000 series SAS/SATA unified RAID cards with PCI-E 8x interface. they feature 1.2Ghz dual-core IOP processor (dedicated XOR RAID engine), 256M~512M buffer, 4~28 ports.
http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/...yDatasheet.pdf
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03-27-2008, 02:33 PM #19Web Hosting Evangelist
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03-27-2008, 03:15 PM #20Web Hosting Master
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for RAID0, you can just use OS software RAID0, the hardware RAID card won't give you any advantage since you get no redundancy and can't do hot-swap for RAID0. modern high-speed multi-core CPU's can spare some IO processing without much performance hit when they become the "RAID processors" with software RAID running.
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03-27-2008, 03:25 PM #21THE Web Hosting Master
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Karl Zimmerman - Founder & CEO of Steadfast
VMware Virtual Data Center Platform
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Cloud Hosting, Managed Dedicated Servers, Chicago Colocation, and New Jersey Colocation
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03-27-2008, 03:28 PM #22THE Web Hosting Master
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Karl Zimmerman - Founder & CEO of Steadfast
VMware Virtual Data Center Platform
karl @ steadfast.net - Sales/Support: 312-602-2689
Cloud Hosting, Managed Dedicated Servers, Chicago Colocation, and New Jersey Colocation
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03-27-2008, 03:54 PM #23Web Hosting Master
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03-27-2008, 04:15 PM #24THE Web Hosting Master
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Seen any reviews, have any direct experience with these? The main reason we had stopped using Adaptec cards is we ended up needing to RMA about 30% of them in the first year because of various failures.
Also, driver support? I went to their driver page and don't see any Linux drivers listed for those cards: http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support...raid/SAS-5405/Karl Zimmerman - Founder & CEO of Steadfast
VMware Virtual Data Center Platform
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03-27-2008, 06:27 PM #25Web Hosting Master
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not really, but we are getting a couple next week to test them out with various linux distro's, and I will report back.
Originally Posted by Adaptec 5405 Supported Operating Systems