From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Tim Small Subject: what is the best multi-SATA-controller-on-a-single-board out there? Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 11:22:35 +0100 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <410E15EB.7030407@buttersideup.com> References: <20040730234706.M12321@contactbda.com> <20040801150258.M30882@contactbda.com> <1091382829.11770.14.camel@tinny.home.foo> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1091382829.11770.14.camel@tinny.home.foo> To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Scott T. Smith wrote: >Along these lines... what is the best >multi-SATA-controller-on-a-single-board out there? I've had issues with >the 3Ware controllers in JBOD mode where one disk failing affects the >rest of the drives on the controller; are there better (i.e. more >independent) ones out there? > > I've used multiple cheap Promise TX4s PCI cards, and Silicon Image onboard controllers (e.g Tyan Thunder K8SPro dual Opteron board). Haven't had at SATA drives fail yet, so I can't say anything about reliability with failed drives. The Promise cards, are cheap, but only do 66Mhz/32 bit PCI and provide four SATA ports, so they may not be well suited to some boards.. Both chipsets were used with libata on 2.6 kernels, with a mixture of s/w raid5, and s/w raid1. The only slight irritation is the current lack of smartd support (pending libata driver support). I haven't done much in the way of benchmarking on these machines, (just tested linear reads at 42MB/s on 2x 250G/7200 rpm Raid1, and 62MB/s on a 5x 250G/7200 rpm Raid5), but performance is good enough for the tasks that they will be carrying out. Two of these boxes are not commissioned yet, so if anyone would like to have me run some benchmarks, let me know what to run, and I'll see what I can do. BTW, I have just run a linear read test on a similar machine (same kernel), but with 2x PATA (similar 250G drives), and get 57MB/s on Raid1, so maybe libata performance isn't quite there yet. Tim.