freebsd stable - May 2008 - Best-performing disk I/O options for a DBMS server on 7-STABLE

What's the best option?

Assume PCI/Express bus, having to buy a card AND disk(s) are fine.

I assume SCSI is the best path forward (either SA/SCSI or traditional) but
have been out of the loop on the card(s) that work properly for a good long
while.

What's my best option?

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> What's the best option?
>
> Assume PCI/Express bus, having to buy a card AND disk(s) are fine.
>
> I assume SCSI is the best path forward (either SA/SCSI or traditional) but
> have been out of the loop on the card(s) that work properly for a good long
> while.
>
> What's my best option?
I have a HP DL360 G5 with an addon p800-controller with battery-backed
cache, a msa70-cabinet and 11 2,5" sas-disks @ 15K in raid-6 and one
hotspare. The controller has 512 MB and is performing satisfactory.
This is on FreeBSD 7.0 release and postgresql 8.3.1.

I've heard many positive remarks on areca's raid-controllers as well,
vendor-support on FreeBSD and good performance.

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regards
Claus

When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom,
the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner.

Shakespeare

Karl Denninger wrote:
> I assume SCSI is the best path forward (either SA/SCSI or traditional) but
> have been out of the loop on the card(s) that work properly for a good long
> while.
I've used several of the new 3ware SATA PCI-express cards: 2, 4 and 16
ports.  They always work really well under FreeBSD 6 and 7, and are very
fast.

I haven't tried their SAS cards personally but I understand that it is
equally good.

FWIW, I have had bad experiences with Areca.

- Andrew

> I assume SCSI is the best path forward (either SA/SCSI or traditional) but
> have been out of the loop on the card(s) that work properly for a good long
> while.
HP P400 cards are PCI express and SAS - they work very well under FreeBSD.
I've also used the cheaper E200 and that appears to be fine too, though I
havent run it for as long as the 400's.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/smartarrayp400/index.html

-pete.