I hate to bring up the raid card wars again, but... :) It's pretty well established that 3ware is a good "real" hardware raid card for SATA drives. So what is a good card for SCSI raid? My searches have come up with Adaptec and LSI as the main players here. Are the LSI MegaRAID cards "real" hardware raid? Which cards can give good raid 5 performance? -- Bowie
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 at 11:00am, Bowie Bailey wrote> It's pretty well established that 3ware is a good "real" hardware raid > card for SATA drives. > > So what is a good card for SCSI raid? My searches have come up with > Adaptec and LSI as the main players here. Are the LSI MegaRAID cards > "real" hardware raid? Which cards can give good raid 5 performance?Yes, the MegaRAIDs are "real" hardware RAID (a quick look at the specs shows the onboard IOP). I honestly don't know how they perform in RAID5 (I use mine for a cluster head node, just doing RAID1), but I'd make sure you get the PCI-X (or PCIe) versions rather than the regular PCI ones. The driver support is quite good, but the monitoring is a little tougher. I've been shying away from Adapted for a while now, so I have no experience with them at all. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
Bowie Bailey wrote:> I hate to bring up the raid card wars again, but... :) > > It's pretty well established that 3ware is a good "real" hardware raid > card for SATA drives. > > So what is a good card for SCSI raid? My searches have come up with > Adaptec and LSI as the main players here. Are the LSI MegaRAID cards > "real" hardware raid? Which cards can give good raid 5 performance?Cards that don't use i960 cpus ( really ancient now =D ) and that have plenty of buffer ram (read, onboard RAM or DIMM modules or NVRAM) and of course, battery pack backup for the onboard memory. So 3ware 85xx are out for raid 5 performance but 3ware 9xxx will perform given sufficient RAM as an example. I suspect the same for any SCSI RAID card with regard to RAID 5 performance. Bryan J. Smith had a good explanation why quite some time ago on this list.