SATA vs SCSI RAID 5?

[Ted Cabeen]

"Simon" <simon at optinet.com> writes:

> I've been running 5.2.1-R on an isolated data backup server with 3ware ATA
> 8 channel RAID with 250GB maxtor drives. It does daily backups of multiple
> servers. You can monitor array status using 3amd daemon. So far uptime is
> almost a year. It does nothing but backups... I'm not sure how it would
> compare VS SCSI RAID under high IO. We only use SCSI RAID on our web
> servers which get pretty busy. I'm looking forward to using LSI RAID cards
> with 5.3 I'm using one with 4.x, it's been working fine for several months, now.
> Unfortunately, the monitoring suite is broken due to some bug and I wish
> someone would fix it. I emailed the author, but there was no response.  I'm
> relying on SAF-TE enclosure to tell me if any of the drives are dead. Frankly,
> there isn't much choosing when it comes to SCSI RAID and FreeBSD as of
> late. It's either the adaptec, which has a share of it's problems, or LSI which
> works fine but lacks monitoring tools.

Is there even source out there for the LSI monitoring tools?  The only
copy of LSI monitoring tools I've ever found was just a binary
package.  It works great on 4.X though.  

> On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:50:49 -0500 (EST), Gerald wrote:
>
>>I recently setup a SATA RAID1 box on a highpoint controller. The
>>machine is playing very nicely with FreeBSD and doing much better than
>>I initially expected. Now I'm considering upgrading a SCSI system to
>>another SATA RAID 5 system.
>>
>>Can anyone tell me about SATA RAID 5 experiences? The company I'm
>>looking at purchasing this from is using the Highpoint R1820 controller.
>>
>>SATA= "putting the 'I' back in RAID" or "magic 8 ball says, 'Ask again
>>later."?
>>
>>For reference on the decision making, the present machine is setup on an
>>Adaptec 3200S with all but one of the partitions as RAID1 and the last
>>one as RAID5. All the drives in the present system are SCSI SCA 10k RPMs
>>I believe. The machine is primarily an apache 1.3/freeBSD 4 web server
>>doing 25-30 MB of web traffic at peak 17-20 MB on Average.
>>
>>Gerald

-- 
Ted Cabeen           http://www.pobox.com/~secabeen             ted at cabeen.org
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