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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
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    459

    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

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Posts
    124
    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.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Apr 2003
    Location
    San Jose, CA.
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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.
    AS1426 https:/www.lightwave.net
    Primary Bandwidth: EGIHosting (NLayer, NTT, HE, Cogent)
    Xen PV VPS Hosting

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
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    459
    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

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Location
    Dallas, TX
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    1,498
    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

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
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    459
    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

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Il
    Posts
    448
    We use alot of these, they have ran good for us.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Tpk=16-116-043
    http://www.realwebhost.net
    http://www.realwebhost.net/vps.php
    ICQ 120397604 |MSN : hotmail.com | AIM : rwhsupport | Yahoo: rwhmax

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by joelin View Post
    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
    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.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Il
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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

  10. #10
    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).
    Derek Raines
    Gigenet Communications - Chicago, IL

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Posts
    71
    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.

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Austin, Texas
    Posts
    272
    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
    ██ Network design, security, and implementation
    ██ BSD & Linux consulting, training, and hosting
    ██ https://www.hermetek.com | 1.512.792.2525

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Lynnwood, WA
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    438
    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.

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    NE Ohio
    Posts
    47
    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"]

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
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    Sheffield, South Yorks
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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
    The Agency Hosting Specialist :: 0800 5429 764
    Partner with us and free-up more time for income generating tasks

  16. #16
    Join Date
    May 2007
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    2,042
    so 3ware<areca?

  17. #17
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    Nov 2003
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    Lynnwood, WA
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    Quote Originally Posted by KDAWebServices View Post
    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.
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by asoduk View Post
    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
    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).

  18. #18
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
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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
    C.W. LEE, Apaq Digital Systems
    http://www.apaqdigital.com
    sales@apaqdigital.com

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by KDAWebServices View Post
    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.
    Ah crap.. Are they that bad? I just ordered some of these for a Dual Quad setup... Its going into a RAID0 formation (I know it doesn't give any form of redundancy) to get a little performance increase.

    -Chris

  20. #20
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    Atlanta, GA
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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.
    C.W. LEE, Apaq Digital Systems
    http://www.apaqdigital.com
    sales@apaqdigital.com

  21. #21
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Chicago, IL
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    Quote Originally Posted by KDAWebServices View Post
    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.
    Are you running them with write cache off? If so, that could explain it. We have never noted any types of speed issues with the 8006 cards and we're using dozens of them now.
    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

  22. #22
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    Jan 2003
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    Quote Originally Posted by cwl@apaqdigital View Post
    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
    What have you been seeing as the pricing on those?
    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

  23. #23
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    May 2004
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    Quote Originally Posted by KarlZimmer View Post
    What have you been seeing as the pricing on those?
    provatage has all these Adaptec 5xxx in stock:
    5405, 4-port, 256M: $332
    5805, 8-port, 512M: $494
    51645, 16-port int + 4-port ext, 512M: $906
    C.W. LEE, Apaq Digital Systems
    http://www.apaqdigital.com
    sales@apaqdigital.com

  24. #24
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Chicago, IL
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    Quote Originally Posted by cwl@apaqdigital View Post
    provatage has all these Adaptec 5xxx in stock:
    5405, 4-port, 256M: $332
    5805, 8-port, 512M: $494
    51645, 16-port int + 4-port ext, 512M: $906
    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

    karl @ steadfast.net - Sales/Support: 312-602-2689
    Cloud Hosting, Managed Dedicated Servers, Chicago Colocation, and New Jersey Colocation

  25. #25
    Join Date
    May 2004
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    Atlanta, GA
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    Quote Originally Posted by KarlZimmer View Post
    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/
    not really, but we are getting a couple next week to test them out with various linux distro's, and I will report back.

    Quote Originally Posted by Adaptec 5405 Supported Operating Systems
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.0, 5.0
    SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9.0, 10.0
    SCO OpenServer 6.0
    SCO UnixWare 7.1.4
    Sun Solaris 10
    FreeBSD 5.4, 6.1, 6.2
    VMware ESX Server 3.0.1, 3.0.2
    30% hmmmm!? we've been installing Adaptec 3000 series SAS RAID cards extensively in last few months, and didn't hear any complaints from clients though .....
    C.W. LEE, Apaq Digital Systems
    http://www.apaqdigital.com
    sales@apaqdigital.com

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