Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Ian Thurlbeck]

Dear All

I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"

Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
box support on a Fedora system ?

Many thanks

Ian
-- 
Ian Thurlbeck                http://www.stams.strath.ac.uk/
Statistics and Modelling Science, University of Strathclyde
Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, UK,  G1 1XH
Tel: +44 (0)141 548 3667           Fax: +44 (0)141 552 2079

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 at 4:37pm, Ian Thurlbeck wrote

> I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
> these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"
>
> Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
> box support on a Fedora system ?

3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather 
than either of the 9xxx series cards.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Mark Hahn]

> > I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
> > these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"
> >
> > Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
> > box support on a Fedora system ?

which FC release?  I believe FC4 would have decent support for 
promise tx4's (there are at least two - the most recent might
not work OOB).  sil 3114's ought to work as well.

> 3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather 
> than either of the 9xxx series cards.

before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: 
expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
quite impressive...

regards, mark hahn

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Ian Thurlbeck]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>>>I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
>>>these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"
>>>
>>>Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
>>>box support on a Fedora system ?
> 
> 
> which FC release?  I believe FC4 would have decent support for 
> promise tx4's (there are at least two - the most recent might
> not work OOB).  sil 3114's ought to work as well.
>

Hi

Currently FC4, but I could update to FC5 on these machines if necessary.
I should add that performance is not really an issue - it's mostly
a read-only data store.  I don't really want to fork out 250 UKPounds
per SATA card (i.e. 3ware 8506) since I don't need
the capabilities (hardware RAID) nor the performance (but I suppose
if I'm forking out 750 UKP for disks what's another 250?)

Mike Hardy recommended the Addonics ADST114 (sil 3114) which has an entry on 
this page:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

A little bit outdated though.  (Amazing how many "RAID" cards are "fakeraid")

Thanks for the help!

Ian

> 
>>3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather 
>>than either of the 9xxx series cards.
> 
> 
> before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance: 
> expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
> quite impressive...
> 
> regards, mark hahn
> 
> -
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-- 
Ian Thurlbeck                http://www.stams.strath.ac.uk/
Statistics and Modelling Science, University of Strathclyde
Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, UK,  G1 1XH
Tel: +44 (0)141 548 3667           Fax: +44 (0)141 552 2079

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Mark Hahn]

> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
> A little bit outdated though.  (Amazing how many "RAID" cards are "fakeraid")

well, the page is useful in that it discusses particular products,
but the "fakeraid" stuff is just silly name-calling.  there are either
real (hardware) raid cards, and there are multiport cards.  "fakeraid"
just means that there is code in the bios to do software raid 0/1 - 
not a bad thing in any possible sense, though also of zero value to many
people.

the prevalence of "fakeraid" simply shows that to be worth doing,
hw raid requires a pretty hefty piece of hardware, like the 3ware 9550.
older boards that had, for instance, a single pc100 dimm on them were 
the kiss of death, since just seeing that you knew that they couldn't 
move more than 10-20 MB/s, much less than a single disk's worth.

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Mattias Wadenstein]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Mark Hahn wrote:

>> 3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather
>> than either of the 9xxx series cards.
>
> before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance:
> expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
> quite impressive...

I'd still recommend 3ware for the md case, because of reliability. For my 
6-disk raid a 8506-4 was actually slightly faster than two sil3114s 
running md raid5. The 3ware card has the additional advantage of not 
pushing the machine into a hard hang once per day or so when doing io over 
the raid layer.

You're right though in that the hw raid performance was rather bad until 
the 9550.

/Mattias Wadenstein

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 at 11:28am, Mattias Wadenstein wrote

> On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Mark Hahn wrote:
>
>>> 3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather
>>> than either of the 9xxx series cards.
>> 
>> before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance:
>> expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
>> quite impressive...
>
> I'd still recommend 3ware for the md case, because of reliability. For my 
> 6-disk raid a 8506-4 was actually slightly faster than two sil3114s running 
> md raid5. The 3ware card has the additional advantage of not pushing the 
> machine into a hard hang once per day or so when doing io over the raid 
> layer.

That's exactly why I recommended them.  3w-xxxx has been in the kernel a 
*long* time and is extremely stable.  Sure, it's expensive for "just" a 
SATA controller, but not for a solid one that doesn't fall over at random 
times.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Re[2]: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Jim Klimov]

Hello Joshua,

JBL> That's exactly why I recommended them.  3w-xxxx has been in the kernel a
JBL> *long* time and is extremely stable.  Sure, it's expensive for "just" a
JBL> SATA controller, but not for a solid one that doesn't fall over at random
JBL> times.
Just for my 2 cents: we have a number of different generations of
3Ware cards (IDE and SATA) in our campus network, mostly with Western
Digital drives.

It seems quite beneficial to use their Raid Edition series of drives
instead of desktop ones. Beside the longer warranty and perhaps better
manufacturing and better resistance to vibration, according to the WD
site, these drives also report errors (if any) quicker to a host
adapter. This results in errors being handled by RAID hardware
gracefully, instead of the whole drive being considered as timed out.

In practice, we had some fun months with a RAID5 set made of desktop
Caviars rebuilding once in a while for no apparent reason, with each
disk working well for a long time. And we had no such problem with
RE disks for over a year now.

Hope this helps some list readers make their choice, and please don't
consider this an advertisement of certain brands ;) If any other
manufaturer offers capabilities similar to WD RE (especially timeouts),
please take a better look if you consider a hardware RAID controller.

-- 
Best regards,
 Jim Klimov                            mailto:klimov@2ka.mipt.ru

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 at 10:38pm, Mark Hahn wrote

> before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance:
> expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
> quite impressive...

I like the 3wares for their ability to do true hot swap in hardware RAID 
mode.  I have 2 older servers with 7500 cards in 'em that I recently tried 
to migrate to md (for speed, as you mentioned).  All my testing with 
'mdadm --fail' went just fine.  However, when a disk actually died and the 
3ware booted it, the server hung.  So I migrated 'em back to hardware 
RAID (but RAID10 instead of RAID5).

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Jon Lewis]

I've got several systems with pairs of Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20318 
(SATA150 TX4) and no problems other than lack of support in the install 
kernels back when we got them (about a year and a half ago).

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Mike Hardy]

Addonics adst114 was the cheapest one I've found that works. I found it
for $41 at thenerds.net but you may be better at the price searching
than me.

It's a Silicon Images 3114 chip, driven by the sata_sil driver

I honestly don't recall if it was out-of-the-box working on FC4, but the
updated kernels drive it fine, and FC5 (with 2.6.16+) should be fine
with it.

-Mike

Ian Thurlbeck wrote:
> 
> Dear All
> 
> I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
> these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"
> 
> Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
> box support on a Fedora system ?
> 
> Many thanks
> 
> Ian

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Christopher Smith]

Ian Thurlbeck wrote:
> 
> Dear All
> 
> I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
> these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"
> 
> Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
> box support on a Fedora system ?

I have had a lot of success with Promise TX4 cards, with the caveat that 
  more than two controllers can't be in the same box (or couldn't as of 
a few months ago - this may have been fixed).  They're fairly cheap and 
run on a 66Mhz PCI bus, if you've got one, whereas most of the other 
cheap cards are only regular 33Mhz.  Mine (with 4x250G 7200rpm drives) 
can sustain about 200MB/sec if configured in a RAID0.

I haven't seen a better card from a price/performance perspective if 
you're going to use md.

CS

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Brad Campbell]

Christopher Smith wrote:
> Ian Thurlbeck wrote:
>>
>> Dear All
>>
>> I have 4x500GB Maxtor SATA drives and I want to attach
>> these to a 4-port SATA PCI card and RAID5 them using "md"
>>
>> Could anybody recommend a card that will have out of
>> box support on a Fedora system ?
> 
> I have had a lot of success with Promise TX4 cards, with the caveat that 
>  more than two controllers can't be in the same box (or couldn't as of a 
> few months ago - this may have been fixed).  They're fairly cheap and 

I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four in another for a year now... 
the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 drives, but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all 
connected drives.

I have 11 drives in one box (on promise.. 2 on the on-board VIA and 1 on PATA) and 15 drives in 
another (all across 4 promise cards).. all on SATA150-TX4 cards..

Performance sucks.. but then when you put 15 drives on a single PCI 33Mhz bus what do you expect ?
Great for streaming media though.. (and cheap, and very reliable). The only media errors I get are 
on the VIA controller. The promise controllers have not had a single media error since they were 
installed.

Brad
-- 
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability
to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable
for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Christopher Smith]

Brad Campbell wrote:
> I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four in 
> another for a year now... the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 drives, 
> but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all connected drives.

What distro and kernel ?

I tried this about 2 - 3 months ago and had problems whenever more than 
two cards were in my system, even if only a single drive was installed. 
  I posted about it here (search for "multiple promise sata150 tx4 
cards" back in January).

The symptoms were ata timeouts:

ata3: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata3: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata3: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata3: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata2: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata2: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata2: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata2: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }

This would happen consistently with three controllers in, never with 
two.  I tried every possible combination of controllers and drives I 
could think of, to eliminate any potential of broken hardware being the 
cause.

I should probably give it another go, given there have been a couple of 
minor kernel versions since then, but I'm surprised to hear you've had 
it working for so long - no-one was able to give me a solution to my 
problem at the time (I ended up getting a pair of two-channel SATA 
cards) and I assumed it was a driver bug of some description.  Promise, 
of course, were useless, saying more than a single controller was an 
unsupported configuration.

> I have 11 drives in one box (on promise.. 2 on the on-board VIA and 1 on 
> PATA) and 15 drives in another (all across 4 promise cards).. all on 
> SATA150-TX4 cards..
> 
> Performance sucks.. but then when you put 15 drives on a single PCI 
> 33Mhz bus what do you expect ?
> Great for streaming media though.. (and cheap, and very reliable). The 
> only media errors I get are on the VIA controller. The promise 
> controllers have not had a single media error since they were installed.

I have no complaints about the performance (relatively speaking, of 
course), but I've got the cards in a machine with multiple PCI-X busses, 
so it's not really bottlenecked there.

CS

Re: Recommendations for supported 4-port SATA PCI card ?

[Brad Campbell]

Christopher Smith wrote:
> Brad Campbell wrote:
>> I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four 
>> in another for a year now... the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 
>> drives, but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all 
>> connected drives.
> 
> What distro and kernel ?

Err.. well, I started with 2.4 originally and I've run 2.6.5, 2.6.9, 2.6.10-bk10, 2.6.15.1 and now 
2.6.16 on both boxes.. never an issue with multiple card support..

It's based on Debian mostly, but to be honest it's not important as the kernel is always self 
compiled as with mdadm..

> 
> I tried this about 2 - 3 months ago and had problems whenever more than 
> two cards were in my system, even if only a single drive was installed. 
>  I posted about it here (search for "multiple promise sata150 tx4 cards" 
> back in January).

I recall the thread.. don't think I replied then as I did not really have anything to say I guess.

> 
> I have no complaints about the performance (relatively speaking, of 
> course), but I've got the cards in a machine with multiple PCI-X busses, 
> so it's not really bottlenecked there.

Perhaps its related to that. All mine are on ASUS A7V600 motherboards with a single bog standard PCI 
bus. At one point early on I recall someone stating they were having all sorts of problems with 
those cards and a 66Mhz bus..

Are you running the latest BIOS in all the cards? Only ask as the 1st thing I did when mine arrived 
was to upgrade the BIOS.. not using it but I thought it might have some impact on the way they are 
set up on the PCI bus.

I have a mate who has another 3 in his box also.. but again he's on an ASUS A7V600 motherboard.

I'm looking to build another 15 drive box soon and I was thinking of perhaps a couple of 8 port 
Marvell cards, but then I might just stick with what I know and source some more of the same.

Regards,
Brad
-- 
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability
to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable
for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams