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rev138
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Joined: 19 Jun 2003
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Location: Vermont, USA
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 Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 9:02 pm Post subject: Looking for recommendations: Cheap SATA RAID5 controller |
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Can anyone recommend an inexpensive SATA RAID5 controller that works more or less hassle free w/ Gentoo?
I'm hoping to stay $150 or less.
Thanks in advance.
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Mad Merlin
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rev138
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| Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 11:45 pm Post subject: |
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"Better off" in what respect?
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neysx
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Joined: 27 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2007 12:55 pm Post subject: Re: Looking for recommendations: Cheap SATA RAID5 controller |
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| rev138 wrote: | Can anyone recommend an inexpensive SATA RAID5 controller that works more or less hassle free w/ Gentoo?
I'm hoping to stay $150 or less. |
There's no such thing unless you are lucky and find one on ebay. FYI, I bought a 3ware 9500S for 100 EUR.
Please be aware that while raid5 protects your data against one HD failure, it does not give you any protection whatsoever against a controller failure. Should it fail, you'll most likely need an identical one before you can access your data. Using JBOD and kernel-based raid allows you to move your disks to another controller/mobo. Use your mobo sata ports or buy a cheap sata card. I have a dirt cheap sil3112 that I am happy with.
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Mad Merlin
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| Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2007 7:15 pm Post subject: |
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| rev138 wrote: | | "Better off" in what respect? |
As the above poster mentioned, if your controller dies, your data may still be in tact, but you won't be able to access it again without a similar or identical controller. Software RAID always uses the same format, thus you don't need to care about your motherboard dying (with regards to recovering your data...).
Cheaper RAID cards are also more likely to be "fake RAID" (software, not hardware based) and aren't guaranteed to work well with Linux like Linux software RAID is.
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rev138
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| Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 2:56 pm Post subject: |
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Makes sense. Thanks. 
You do take a performance hit with software RAID, yes? How bad is it?
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Kyrra
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Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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Location: Kansas
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| Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 7:50 pm Post subject: |
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| rev138 wrote: | Makes sense. Thanks.
You do take a performance hit with software RAID, yes? How bad is it? |
It shouldn't be too bad. If you expect to be doing a lot of disk IO while having a CPU intensive program going, (ie: Database server) then software RAID is a bad idea.
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rev138
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| Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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I've changed my mind about what I'm going to do after all. I'm going for a simple RAID 1 set up. This is for a web server, which will run mysql, but it's not going to be a dedicated heavy-load database server.
Sound OK?
My drives are SATA, and my CPU is a 2.8GHz Pentium D.
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Mad Merlin
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| Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 9:48 am Post subject: |
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| rev138 wrote: | I've changed my mind about what I'm going to do after all. I'm going for a simple RAID 1 set up. This is for a web server, which will run mysql, but it's not going to be a dedicated heavy-load database server.
Sound OK?
My drives are SATA, and my CPU is a 2.8GHz Pentium D. |
The overhead with software RAID isn't too bad, RAID 1 in particular should present essentially no overhead, as there's no parity bits to calculate. Even with RAID 5, the overhead with writing isn't too bad (and the overhead for reading is similar to that of RAID 1), about 5-10% of one core for me when stressing the RAID array as much as possible. I'm using an Athlon X2 4200+ with 4 320G SATA II drives.
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DrAgOnTuX
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Joined: 22 Aug 2006
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Location: Switzerland
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| Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 11:51 am Post subject: |
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my raid5 software raid (using mdadm) is about getting 5-10% on extremly heavy load (3x writing 'dd' & 3x reading 'dd' @ gigabyte files on the same partition), P4 2,533 GHz, 1GB DDR333, 5x250GB SATA / IDE (mixed, thats of course only possible with special rare controllers or with software raids  )
raid 1 is so fast, I never get in trouble about performence, the controllers and harddrives are to slow (read: 90MB/s, write: 65MB/s, yeah I know, it's time for a new machine with a faster mainboard and PCI-E and kick off this PCI bottleneck) to keep my cpu getting hotter  |
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rev138
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| Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 2:21 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the info, guys.
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