Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Mike Myers]

Hi.  I'm moving my NAS to a new motherboard and disk controller to increase the number of ports.  Right now I feed a couple PMP's worth of SATA disks with a marvell '7042 based controller, but am migrating to a supermicro 775 motherboard that has a few PCI-X slots.  I can get a couple adaptec 16 port SATA  PCI-X controllers on the cheap, but want to migrate my existing software raid arrays to the new ports, so I don't want to use the adaptec RAID software (software raid should be faster in any case).

I believe if I configure the adaptec's BIOS to use JBOD mode instead of the card's RAID that each of the attached disks looks like a normal SATA port in linux that will allow them to be used with software raid in the normal way.  The question I have for the group is how good is the performance of these controllers when used as "dumb" ports in software raid mode?  

Are the LSI megaraid cards better?

I'm curious as to what people think the best SATA controller is these days that has 8 or 16 ports per card driving software raid?

thanks much!
mike


      

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[David Lethe]

so you are basically asking if manufacturer A is faster than manufacturer L?   

-----Original Message-----

From:  "Mike Myers" <mikesm559@yahoo.com>
Subj:  Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid
Date:  Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:45 pm
Size:  1K
To:  "linux-raid@vger.kernel.org" <linux-raid@vger.kernel.org>

Hi.  I'm moving my NAS to a new motherboard and disk controller to increase the number of ports.  Right now I feed a couple PMP's worth of SATA disks with a marvell '7042 based controller, but am migrating to a supermicro 775 motherboard that has a few PCI-X slots.  I can get a couple adaptec 16 port SATA  PCI-X controllers on the cheap, but want to migrate my existing software raid arrays to the new ports, so I don't want to use the adaptec RAID software (software raid should be faster in any case). 
 
I believe if I configure the adaptec's BIOS to use JBOD mode instead of the card's RAID that each of the attached disks looks like a normal SATA port in linux that will allow them to be used with software raid in the normal way.  The question I have for the group is how good is the performance of these controllers when used as "dumb" ports in software raid mode?   
 
Are the LSI megaraid cards better? 
 
I'm curious as to what people think the best SATA controller is these days that has 8 or 16 ports per card driving software raid? 
 
thanks much! 
mike 
 
 
       
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Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Mike Myers,

In message <47751.64665.qm@web30802.mail.mud.yahoo.com> you wrote:
>
> I'm curious as to what people think the best SATA controller is
> these days that has 8 or 16 ports per card driving software raid?

The "best" obviously depends on your set of requirements. If you don;t
care about the price the result may be different than when you try to
find a cost-effective solution.

We made really good experience with the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd@denx.de
Backed up the system lately?

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Justin Piszcz]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Wolfgang Denk wrote:

> Dear Mike Myers,
>
> In message <47751.64665.qm@web30802.mail.mud.yahoo.com> you wrote:
>>
>> I'm curious as to what people think the best SATA controller is
>> these days that has 8 or 16 ports per card driving software raid?
>
> The "best" obviously depends on your set of requirements. If you don;t
> care about the price the result may be different than when you try to
> find a cost-effective solution.
>
> We made really good experience with the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Wolfgang Denk

Lets be frank- almost all(?) RAID controllers you must export the disks 
via JBOD and they cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.  Doing SW RAID 
via JBOD IMO is not a great idea-- I'd use individual 2 or 4 port SATA 
controllers on PCI-e.

Justin.

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Justin Piszcz,

In message <alpine.DEB.1.10.0810310813240.468@p34.internal.lan> you wrote:
> 
> > We made really good experience with the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards.
...
> Lets be frank- almost all(?) RAID controllers you must export the disks 
> via JBOD and they cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.  Doing SW RAID 
> via JBOD IMO is not a great idea-- I'd use individual 2 or 4 port SATA 
> controllers on PCI-e.

Right. The AOC-SAT2-MV8 is a 8 port PCI-X controller without any RAID
support - and costs just around $ 100. That's why I like it.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd@denx.de
The optimum committee has no members.
                                                   - Norman Augustine

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Justin Piszcz]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Wolfgang Denk wrote:

> Dear Justin Piszcz,
>
> In message <alpine.DEB.1.10.0810310813240.468@p34.internal.lan> you wrote:
>>
>>> We made really good experience with the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards.
> ...
>> Lets be frank- almost all(?) RAID controllers you must export the disks
>> via JBOD and they cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.  Doing SW RAID
>> via JBOD IMO is not a great idea-- I'd use individual 2 or 4 port SATA
>> controllers on PCI-e.
>
> Right. The AOC-SAT2-MV8 is a 8 port PCI-X controller without any RAID
> support - and costs just around $ 100. That's why I like it.

Yes, very nice, I wish there was an 8-port PCI-e controller non-raid..
I've contacted StarTech about this they said they currently do not offer 
such a product but would look into it.

Justin.

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Mike Myers]

Well, I can get the 16 port adaptecs for the same price ($100) from a local shop disposing of servers from failed companies. So the price isn't an issue.  It's density.  I'd like to be able to hang 24+ drives off one system, so I can't get there by using 4 port PCI-E cards.   Not enough slots, and the 4 port cards cost almost as much as the 16 port port adaptecs I can get.

What I am asking about is the comparative performance of 8 and 16 port SATA controllers being used in software raid.  It makes no sense to do this if you are paying retail prices for them I know...  

So, back to the question at hand - what is the best performing 8 or 16 port SATA controller (hardware raid on board or not) available?

Thx
Mike




----- Original Message ----
From: Wolfgang Denk <wd@denx.de>
To: Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>
Cc: Mike Myers <mikesm559@yahoo.com>; linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 5:19:46 AM
Subject: Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

Dear Justin Piszcz,

In message <alpine.DEB.1.10.0810310813240.468@p34.internal.lan> you wrote:
> 
> > We made really good experience with the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards.
...
> Lets be frank- almost all(?) RAID controllers you must export the disks 
> via JBOD and they cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.  Doing SW RAID 
> via JBOD IMO is not a great idea-- I'd use individual 2 or 4 port SATA 
> controllers on PCI-e.

Right. The AOC-SAT2-MV8 is a 8 port PCI-X controller without any RAID
support - and costs just around $ 100. That's why I like it.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd@denx.de
The optimum committee has no members.
                                                   - Norman Augustine



      

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Mike Myers]

Well, actually if the chips that manufacturer A uses are faster in software raid than manufacturer L...  :-)  

thx
mike




----- Original Message ----
From: David Lethe <david@santools.com>
To: Mike Myers <mikesm559@yahoo.com>; linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 10:21:00 PM
Subject: Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

so you are basically asking if manufacturer A is faster than manufacturer L?  

-----Original Message-----

From:  "Mike Myers" <mikesm559@yahoo.com>
Subj:  Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid
Date:  Thu Oct 30, 2008 11:45 pm
Size:  1K
To:  "linux-raid@vger.kernel.org" <linux-raid@vger.kernel.org>

Hi.  I'm moving my NAS to a new motherboard and disk controller to increase the number of ports.  Right now I feed a couple PMP's worth of SATA disks with a marvell '7042 based controller, but am migrating to a supermicro 775 motherboard that has a few PCI-X slots.  I can get a couple adaptec 16 port SATA  PCI-X controllers on the cheap, but want to migrate my existing software raid arrays to the new ports, so I don't want to use the adaptec RAID software (software raid should be faster in any case). 

I believe if I configure the adaptec's BIOS to use JBOD mode instead of the card's RAID that each of the attached disks looks like a normal SATA port in linux that will allow them to be used with software raid in the normal way.  The question I have for the group is how good is the performance of these controllers when used as "dumb" ports in software raid mode?  

Are the LSI megaraid cards better? 

I'm curious as to what people think the best SATA controller is these days that has 8 or 16 ports per card driving software raid? 

thanks much! 
mike 


      
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Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Justin Piszcz]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Mike Myers wrote:

> Well, actually if the chips that manufacturer A uses are faster in software raid than manufacturer L...  :-)
>
> thx
> mike
>
>
Mike,

What sustained rates for sequential read/writes have you been able to 
achieve with multiple (HW) based PCI-X RAID cards?

Isn't there a drop in performance when exporting a drive via JBOD vs. 
directly attached to a SATA controller?  I remember raptors on a SiI 3112 
(or the raid chip on an ABIT IC7-G, its been awhile)-- in RAID mode on a 
motherboard, it was (this was a while ago) 40-50MiB/s whereas the same raptor
connected to a regular sata controller was closer to 70-80MiB/s (74GiB raptor).

Justin.

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Mike Myers]

Well, sometimes the onboard ports run a lot faster than a card because the card is hooked through a PCI bus that may be doing a lot of other things.

I have heard from various reports that the jbod performance of the card is fine, but that the RAID performance sucks (because of the hardware raid controller slowing things down).  But that is why I am asking folks here if they have any experience with these things in jbod mode vs raid mode.  Remember that I have no interest in using the hardware raid part of the card.  The 66 Mhz 64 bit PCI-X bus should limit things much.

thx
mike




----- Original Message ----
From: Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@lucidpixels.com>
To: Mike Myers <mikesm559@yahoo.com>
Cc: David Lethe <david@santools.com>; linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 11:48:58 AM
Subject: Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid


On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Mike Myers wrote:

> Well, actually if the chips that manufacturer A uses are faster in software raid than manufacturer L...  :-)
>
> thx
> mike
>
>
Mike,

What sustained rates for sequential read/writes have you been able to 
achieve with multiple (HW) based PCI-X RAID cards?

Isn't there a drop in performance when exporting a drive via JBOD vs. 
directly attached to a SATA controller?  I remember raptors on a SiI 3112 
(or the raid chip on an ABIT IC7-G, its been awhile)-- in RAID mode on a 
motherboard, it was (this was a while ago) 40-50MiB/s whereas the same raptor
connected to a regular sata controller was closer to 70-80MiB/s (74GiB raptor).

Justin.


      

Re: Adaptec raid congtrollers for SATA disks under software raid

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Mike Myers,

In message <430424.80078.qm@web30802.mail.mud.yahoo.com> you wrote:
> Well, I can get the 16 port adaptecs for the same price ($100) from a local shop disposing of servers from failed companies. So the price isn't an issue.  It's density.  I'd like to be able to hang 24+ drives off one system, so I can't get there by usin
> g 4 port PCI-E cards.   Not enough slots, and the 4 port cards cost almost as much as the 16 port port adaptecs I can get.

Are the adaptec drivers completely open source by now?  Last  time  I
had  such  a  beast theey depended on a binary-ony module which would
make each and every kernel update a major PITA.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd@denx.de
"I'm not a god, I was misquoted."                 - Lister, Red Dwarf