suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Steven Hartland]

Mark Kirkwood wrote:
> Just out of interest what RAID level was the 5 disk array? - as
> 180Mb/s from an Areca 5 disk RAID0 or RAID5 array is not that good -
> my old 3Ware 7506 with 4 Maxtor IDE RAID0 gets 175Mb/s. Obviously if
> your array is RAID10, the 180MB/s is very good!
> 
> If you are using RAID0|5, then something is slowing you down (possible
> clash between disk firmware and the Areca, or unfortunate choice of
> strip chunk size).

Dont know which test I was remembering but just did a quicky:
OS: FreeBSD 6.1
RAID: 5 on 5 * 400GB Seagate
Controller: HighPoint 1820a
CPU: Dual Opteron 244
RAM: 2Gb
/usr/bin/time -h dd if=/dev/da0 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes transferred in 44.887239 secs (233602250 bytes/sec)
        44.88s real             0.03s user              2.40s sys

In comparison:
OS: FreeBSD 5.4
RAID: 5 on 6 * 300GB Seagate
Controller: Areca 1120
CPU: Dual Opteron 248
RAM: 4Gb
/usr/bin/time -h dd if=/dev/da0 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes transferred in 81.598938 secs (128503633 bytes/sec)
        1m21.60s real           0.00s user              2.69s sys

So for the money they HighPoint is nothing to be sneezed at.

Of course this is a very crude test not comparing totally like for
like. Under load the Areca is quicker and has the flexibility of
online capacity expansion and raid level migration but...

    Steve


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