Very Computer

what is your experience with the SATA RAID Controllers of Areca?

This test of tweakers.net tells me that it's by far the best performing
controller available, at least for fileservers:

http://www.veryComputer.com/
http://www.veryComputer.com/

But I feel a little bit worried about it beeing a somewhat *
solution. What's your opinion?

Thanks in advance!

Regards
Christoph

Quote:> what is your experience with the SATA RAID Controllers of Areca?

They have yet to respond to my request for performance numbers for raid
5 and 6 arrays in degraded mode that I sent them on the 14th.

The PCIe models are 8x which does not mesh well with current dual
Opteron motherboards (not Tekram's fault of course), and using less
than 8x had a big performance impact as reported in one fo the
storagereview.com forums.

/Allan

--
M?ns Rullg?rd

Quote:> Hello all,
> what is your experience with the SATA RAID Controllers of Areca?
> This test of tweakers.net tells me that it's by far the best performing
> controller available, at least for fileservers:
> http://www.veryComputer.com/
> http://www.veryComputer.com/
> But I feel a little bit worried about it beeing a somewhat *
> solution. What's your opinion?

Wouldn't trust those stats, IIRC saw various SATA performance
test were 3ware controller were far ahead of anything else, in
the above test they seem to be among the slowest. Makes you
wonder?

At least 3ware controller are 100% supported through GPL driver
which comes with a kernel.org tarball. There are linux CLI/GUI
tools to configure them under Linux from 3ware available.

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)

#bofh excuse 398: Data for intranet got routed through the
extranet and landed on the internet.

Quote:> The test was run under doze, so it doesn't tell anything, we
> don't even know if the controller is supported at all?

"ARC SATA-II RAID adapters support broad operating systems include
Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Red Hat Linux (Open
Source), SuSE Linux (Open Source), and FreeBSD."

A quick grep through 2.6.11.11 source tree did not turn up anything, nor
did I find a way to download drivers.

Quote:> Wouldn't trust those stats, IIRC saw various SATA performance
> test were 3ware controller were far ahead of anything else, in
> the above test they seem to be among the slowest. Makes you
> wonder?

/Allan

Quote:>> Wouldn't trust those stats, IIRC saw various SATA performance
>> test were 3ware controller were far ahead of anything else, in
>> the above test they seem to be among the slowest. Makes you
>> wonder?
> Links?

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)

#bofh excuse 210: We didn't pay the Internet bill and it's
been cut off.

Obviously the idea was here for you to provide the links to said reviews
to substantiate your claim that 3wave performed better.  Enumerating all
reviews via a search engine does not tell me which ones you were
referring to as more creditable than the one the original poster
referred us to.

The raid5 link provided previously was very interesting; software raid10
seems attractive either using md raid1 or wait for the lvm mirror code
to mature.  Both from a cost perspective on small arrays, and
reliability in general.

/Allan

This one shows 3ware performance ahead of anything else, you can
find numerous other benchmark showing the same:

http://www20.tomshardware.com/storage/20040831/sata-raid-controller-1...

Others can be found using google...

Quote:> Obviously the idea was here for you to provide the links to said reviews
> to substantiate your claim that 3wave performed better.  Enumerating all
> reviews via a search engine does not tell me which ones you were
> referring to as more creditable than the one the original poster
> referred us to.

Bought a, you get it, 3ware controller and had zero problems with
it in >1 year. It's blazing fast and 3ware 100% supports Linux.

Quote:> The raid5 link provided previously was very interesting; software raid10
> seems attractive either using md raid1 or wait for the lvm mirror code
> to mature.  Both from a cost perspective on small arrays, and
> reliability in general.

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)

#bofh excuse 413: Cow-tippers tipped a cow onto the server.

As to why 3ware isn't at the top of the tweakers.net chart, one
difference is that tweakers.net tested more cards, including the Areca
controllers under discussion and a couple of SCSI RAID cards (LSI
MegaRAID 320-2X and Adaptec 2230SLP, maybe others) that Tom's didn't.

But there are some oddities with the tweakers.net article.  An
interesting point is that tweakers.net tested only the Areca controller
with more than four disks.  It strikes me as very odd that the test
wasn't done for a 12-disk array on a 3ware controller.  It also strikes
me as odd that the 3ware tested by tweakers.net (the 8506) had no
on-board cache where the top-performing Areca had 1GB on-board.

I started writing this to point out that the tweakers.net review simply
tested more combinations than Tom's and that might account for why 3ware
wasn't at the top.  But now that I've noticed that the Areca had so much
cache when the 3ware didn't have any, and that the 3ware was only tested
with four disks, I no longer have much faith in the validity of the
tweakers.net review.

--
        Markku Kolkka

Quote:> But there are some oddities with the tweakers.net article.  An
> interesting point is that tweakers.net tested only the Areca controller
> with more than four disks.  It strikes me as very odd that the test
> wasn't done for a 12-disk array on a 3ware controller.  It also strikes
> me as odd that the 3ware tested by tweakers.net (the 8506) had no
> on-board cache where the top-performing Areca had 1GB on-board.

Quote:> I started writing this to point out that the tweakers.net review simply
> tested more combinations than Tom's and that might account for why 3ware
> wasn't at the top.  But now that I've noticed that the Areca had so much
> cache when the 3ware didn't have any, and that the 3ware was only tested
> with four disks, I no longer have much faith in the validity of the
> tweakers.net review.

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)

#bofh excuse 448: vi needs to be upgraded to vii

The driver hasn't made it into the vanilla kernel yet. That's quite
normal for a new piece of hardware.

Christoph

They offer the drivers source and precompiled modules for different
distributions, even for Debian and Mandrake. They even offer a lib and
headers for direct access to the controller. All this looks promising
for the linux world. But up to now I have no information regarding
performance under linux.

Christoph

Quote:> wasn't done for a 12-disk array on a 3ware controller.  It also strikes
> me as odd that the 3ware tested by tweakers.net (the 8506) had no
> on-board cache where the top-performing Areca had 1GB on-board.

So I cannot see "oddities" in the tweakers.net article.

What strikes me is that 3ware representatives have been telling for
years now that a big cache doesn't make sense with a well designed
(S)ATA RAID controller, but finally switched to a 128/256MB cache design
with the 9500 series. When I asked a 3ware salesman some time ago why
they changed their mind, he told me: "The cache still doesn't make
sense. We implemented it only to satisfy customers who were constantly
asking for it."  ;-)

Christoph

/Allan