From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Harold Subject: Re: HBA Adaptor advice Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 15:10:00 -0400 Message-ID: <4DD56B08.6020707@nybeta.com> References: <4DD50C89.8060006@wildgooses.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Return-path: In-Reply-To: <4DD50C89.8060006@wildgooses.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Ed W Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 5/19/2011 8:26 AM, Ed W wrote: > Hi, following on from a recent thread, can folks with decent > multi-port HBA adaptors please chime in with some model numbers of > known decent adaptors please? > > The required use is to grow from currently 8 ish drives to perhaps > 12-24 drives per machine. (It partitions out as: one or more RAID6 > arrays for data, plus a couple of backup drives) > > Ideally I would like a controller with writeback cache and BBU since > whilst this office machine is likely quite underused, for any > sensible amount of IO (some of the other machines we might upgrade) > this seems to give a 10-100x increase in IOPs? For the moment it's > just a nice to have though > > I only intend to use linux software raid, so any onboard raid > functionality is just a liability. Budget is either low =A3100 ish fo= r > multi-port HBAs without cache, up to =A31000 ish for 16-24 port high > performance cache controllers: I've been using a SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 (which is on your avoid=20 list), which reports itself as: class: SCSI bus: PCI detached: 0 driver: mvsas desc: "Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV64460/64461/64462 System=20 Controller, Revision B" vendorId: 11ab deviceId: 6485 subVendorId: 15d9 subDeviceId: 0500 I've had it about 6 months at this point with SATA drives hooked up to=20 it. The issues that I've had with it dropping disks from the 6-disk=20 RAID-10 array on CentOS 5.5 / 5.6 can probably be traced to: Not using enterprise grade SATA disks (as the consumer brand takes too=20 long to timeout on a bad seek, and mdadm dropped it from the array).=20 Possibly combined with using a really inexpensive set of removable driv= e=20 trays. There were a lot of times after the weekly resync where the=20 entire array went offline due to multiple drives being dropped. Under normal operation it reads/writes to the disks fine and works fine= =20 as a controller. Since this is my own personal server, I have not=20 tested it with good SAS disks or enterprise SATAs and good drive=20 enclosures. I've since switched over to just hooking up a pair of RAID= 1=20 arrays to it with a direct connect from the card to the drives (no=20 removable trays), but I don't have enough time on the new setup to say=20 that the problem is permanently fixed yet. The card is inexpensive, which is a plus. It's a PCIe x4 card. I don'= t=20 know whether it would be better behaved with a better class of disks /=20 enclosures. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" i= n the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html