suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Chris Hedley]

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Barkley Vowk wrote:
> Little late to the game on this post...

Even later here, but I thought I may as well throw in my tuppence worth 
since I'm going through this again at the moment.

I have an Adaptec 2410SA coupled to 4 250GB discs.  I strongly recommend 
avoiding it: terrible performance, on RAID5 or 10 partitions I get around 
30-40 MB/s on reads and between 3 and 6 MB/s on writes.  Performance is 
probably better if using write back caching on the card and discs, but 
nobody here will be doing that, right?  Its other main "issue" is more 
timeouts than you can shake a stick at under load, and unless you can kill 
off the offending process, the reset button's the only way out.  I tested 
its ability to rebuild its sets after simulating a disc failure by 
removing one of the hot-swap trays, which it repaired without any issues 
other than the time it took; I eventually got fed up with hanging around 
for it to finish, but it was somewhere between 6 and 12 hours.

I suspect I'll go for the Areca this time around, but I think I'll 
approach it with rather more caution as I don't want to find myself with 
another lemon like the 2410SA!

Chris.