I have been using an older 64bit system, socket 754 for a while now. It has
the old PCI bus 33Mhz. I have two low cost (no HW RAID) PCI SATA I cards
each with 4 ports to give me an eight disk RAID 6. I also have a Gig NIC,
on the PCI bus. I have Gig switches with clients connecting to it at Gig
speed.
As many know you get a peak transfer rate of 133 MB/s or 1064Mb/s from that
PCI bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect
The transfer rate is not bad across the network but my bottle neck it the
PCI bus. I have been shopping around for new MB and PCI-express cards. I
have been using mdadm for a long time and would like to stay with it. I am
having trouble finding an eight port PCI-express card that does not have all
the fancy HW RAID which jacks up the cost. I am now considering using a MB
with eight SATA II slots onboard. GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA
nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX.
What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?
I have been using an older 64bit system, socket 754 for a while now. It has
the old PCI bus 33Mhz. I have two low cost (no HW RAID) PCI SATA I cards
each with 4 ports to give me an eight disk RAID 6. I also have a Gig NIC,
on the PCI bus. I have Gig switches with clients connecting to it at Gig
speed.
As many know you get a peak transfer rate of 133 MB/s or 1064Mb/s from that
PCI bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect
The transfer rate is not bad across the network but my bottle neck it the
PCI bus. I have been shopping around for new MB and PCI-express cards. I
have been using mdadm for a long time and would like to stay with it. I am
having trouble finding an eight port PCI-express card that does not have all
the fancy HW RAID which jacks up the cost. I am now considering using a MB
with eight SATA II slots onboard. GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA
nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX.
What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?
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Read this:
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859
I have a similar setup to you, 6 IDE ATA/100 + 2 SATA/150 (all 400GB) in
an mdadm RAID5, works well but it maxes out the PCI bus unfortunately. At
some point I am going to do what you did, get 2 x SATA PCI-e SiL 3114
cards perhaps. Or, after reading that article, consider SAS maybe..?
Justin.
From: Richard Scobie <hidden> Date: 2006-10-22 02:02:06
Dan wrote:
What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?
I have been successfully using a pair of Addonics AD2SA3GPX1 cards, with
4 x 500GB in a stacked RAID0 on top of a pair of RAID1 configuration.
The cards are cheap and use the sil24 driver, which seems to be one of
the better supported.
Performance is good - read/write speeds of 140MB/s in bonnie++ as I recall.
Regards,
Richard
From: Mike Hardy <hidden> Date: 2006-10-22 02:38:09
Justin Piszcz wrote:
cards perhaps. Or, after reading that article, consider SAS maybe..?
I hate to be the guy that breaks out the unsubstantiated anecdotal
evidence, but I've got a RAID10 with 4x300GB Maxtor SAS drives, and I've
already had two trigger their internal SMART "I'm about to fail" message.
They've been in service now for around 2 months, and they do have an
okay temperature, and I have not been beating the crap out of them.
More than a little disappointing.
They are fast though...
-Mike
From: Bill Davidsen <hidden> Date: 2006-10-27 21:22:26
Dan wrote:
I have been using an older 64bit system, socket 754 for a while now. It has
the old PCI bus 33Mhz. I have two low cost (no HW RAID) PCI SATA I cards
each with 4 ports to give me an eight disk RAID 6. I also have a Gig NIC,
on the PCI bus. I have Gig switches with clients connecting to it at Gig
speed.
As many know you get a peak transfer rate of 133 MB/s or 1064Mb/s from that
PCI bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect
The transfer rate is not bad across the network but my bottle neck it the
PCI bus. I have been shopping around for new MB and PCI-express cards. I
have been using mdadm for a long time and would like to stay with it. I am
having trouble finding an eight port PCI-express card that does not have all
the fancy HW RAID which jacks up the cost. I am now considering using a MB
with eight SATA II slots onboard. GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA
nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX.
What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?
There may still be m/b available with multiple PCI busses. Don't know if
you are interested in a low budget solution, but that would address
bandwidth and use existing hardware.
Idle curiousity: what kind of case are you using for the drives? I will
need to spec a machine with eight drives in the December-January timeframe.
--
bill davidsen [off-list ref]
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
From: Daniel Korstad <hidden> Date: 2006-10-27 21:56:16
I have a case what will fit seven HD in standard bays. Than I have four
bays of 5.25 for DVD/CD drives, so I bought this;
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16841101035
leaving me one 5.25 left for the fan. In addition to the fan in the
item above, I have the exhaust fan on the Power Supply, another 12mm
exhaust fan and a 12mm intake that blows across the other HDs.
This is my current case, with a little mod for an extra drive;
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811133133
I have ten drives in it now. Two in a RAID1 for the OS and eight in a
RAID6.
If I were to do it again, I would buy this...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811112064
On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 17:22 -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Dan wrote:
quoted
I have been using an older 64bit system, socket 754 for a while now. It has
the old PCI bus 33Mhz. I have two low cost (no HW RAID) PCI SATA I cards
each with 4 ports to give me an eight disk RAID 6. I also have a Gig NIC,
on the PCI bus. I have Gig switches with clients connecting to it at Gig
speed.
As many know you get a peak transfer rate of 133 MB/s or 1064Mb/s from that
PCI bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect
The transfer rate is not bad across the network but my bottle neck it the
PCI bus. I have been shopping around for new MB and PCI-express cards. I
have been using mdadm for a long time and would like to stay with it. I am
having trouble finding an eight port PCI-express card that does not have all
the fancy HW RAID which jacks up the cost. I am now considering using a MB
with eight SATA II slots onboard. GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA
nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX.
What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?
There may still be m/b available with multiple PCI busses. Don't know if
you are interested in a low budget solution, but that would address
bandwidth and use existing hardware.
Idle curiousity: what kind of case are you using for the drives? I will
need to spec a machine with eight drives in the December-January timeframe.
From: Daniel Korstad <hidden> Date: 2006-10-27 22:18:12
I have a case what will fit seven HD in standard bays. Than I have four
bays of 5.25 for DVD/CD drives, so I bought this;
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16841101035
leaving me one 5.25 left for the fan. In addition to the fan in the
item above, I have the exhaust fan on the Power Supply, another 12mm
exhaust fan and a 12mm intake that blows across the other HDs.
Sorry, I too much of a hurry, those are 120cm exhaust and 120cm intake
I have been using an older 64bit system, socket 754 for a while now. It has
the old PCI bus 33Mhz. I have two low cost (no HW RAID) PCI SATA I cards
each with 4 ports to give me an eight disk RAID 6. I also have a Gig NIC,
on the PCI bus. I have Gig switches with clients connecting to it at Gig
speed.
As many know you get a peak transfer rate of 133 MB/s or 1064Mb/s from that
PCI bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect
The transfer rate is not bad across the network but my bottle neck it the
PCI bus. I have been shopping around for new MB and PCI-express cards. I
have been using mdadm for a long time and would like to stay with it. I am
having trouble finding an eight port PCI-express card that does not have all
the fancy HW RAID which jacks up the cost. I am now considering using a MB
with eight SATA II slots onboard. GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA
nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX.
What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?
There may still be m/b available with multiple PCI busses. Don't know if
you are interested in a low budget solution, but that would address
bandwidth and use existing hardware.
Idle curiousity: what kind of case are you using for the drives? I will
need to spec a machine with eight drives in the December-January timeframe.
On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 17:18 -0500, Daniel Korstad wrote:
quoted
leaving me one 5.25 left for the fan. In addition to the fan in the
item above, I have the exhaust fan on the Power Supply, another 12mm
exhaust fan and a 12mm intake that blows across the other HDs.
Sorry, I too much of a hurry, those are 120cm exhaust and 120cm intake
Hehehe, I'll burn in hell for pointing this out, but as 10mm == 1cm, a
120*mm* fan or 12*cm* fan would be correct. I'm pretty sure your fans
are neither 12mm nor 120cm (or if you do have a 120cm
fan...damn...that's a lot of cooling)...
--
Doug Ledford [off-list ref]
GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
http://people.redhat.com/dledford
Infiniband specific RPMs available at
http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband
I have been using an older 64bit system, socket 754 for a while now. It
has
the old PCI bus 33Mhz. I have two low cost (no HW RAID) PCI SATA I cards
each with 4 ports to give me an eight disk RAID 6. I also have a Gig NIC,
on the PCI bus. I have Gig switches with clients connecting to it at Gig
speed.
As many know you get a peak transfer rate of 133 MB/s or 1064Mb/s from
that
PCI bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect
The transfer rate is not bad across the network but my bottle neck it the
PCI bus. I have been shopping around for new MB and PCI-express cards. I
have been using mdadm for a long time and would like to stay with it. I
am
having trouble finding an eight port PCI-express card that does not have
all
the fancy HW RAID which jacks up the cost. I am now considering using a
MB
with eight SATA II slots onboard. GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA
nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX.
What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?
I agree that SATA drives on PCI-E cards are as much bang-for-buck as is
available right now. On the newer platforms, each PCI-E slot, the onboard
RAID controller(s), and the 32-bit PCI bus all have discrete paths to the
chip.
Play with the thing to see how many disks you can put on a controller
without a slowdown. Don't assume the controller isn't oversold on
bandwidth (I was only able to use three out of four CK804 ports on a
GA-K8NE without saturating it; two out of four slots on a PCI Sil3114).
Combining the bandwidth of the onboard RAID controller, two SATA slots,
and one PCI controller card, sustained reads reach 450MB/s (across 7
disks, RAID-0) with an $80 board, and three $20 controller cards.