3ware sata controllers info
I have had several of the 3 ware ide raid controlles in my machines over the past few years but never have used one of the sata raid controllers. I'm thinking that I'm having a speed problem with ide 3ware raid an want to try out the sata version. I have seen that several people have had problems with sata an want to make sure that if I install one an use it as the boot device that I want run into any problems. I plan to use the Escalade 9500S-8 Storage controller (RAID). Thanks for any info on this one. If this is not a good controller an can you recommend one that your using with good drifve speed. Our server here is has asus k8v 64 bit mother board with 3200 amd cpu in it. I have about 26 or so computers logging onto this server. Since our accounting software upgrade (accpac) we have been seeing some slow downs in accessing it over the network, an from what I can see it not a network/bandwidth issue nor a ram problem so im thinking it might be the ide harddrives an filesystem. also seem to have a slow backup backing up to dlt vs80 tape drive. Before the upgrade we were not experiencing this slowness in using accpac on same machine. Thanks. jack malone Network Administrator EAST TEXAS LIGHTHOUSE FOR THE BLIND dba HORIZON INDUSTRIES 903-595-3444 http://www.horizonind.com
On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:23:03 -0600, Jack Malone wrote:
I have had several of the 3 ware ide raid controlles in my machines over the past few years but never have used one of the sata raid controllers. I'm thinking that I'm having a speed problem with ide 3ware raid an want to try out the sata version. I have seen that several people have had problems with sata an want to make sure that if I install one an use it as the boot device that I want run into any problems. I plan to use the Escalade 9500S-8 Storage controller (RAID). Thanks for any info on this one. If this is not a good controller an can you recommend one that your using with good drifve speed. Our server here is has asus k8v 64 bit mother board with 3200 amd cpu in it. I have about 26 or so computers logging onto this server. Since our accounting software upgrade (accpac) we have been seeing some slow downs in accessing it over the network, an from what I can see it not a network/bandwidth issue nor a ram problem so im thinking it might be the ide harddrives an filesystem. also seem to have a slow backup backing up to dlt vs80 tape drive. Before the upgrade we were not experiencing this slowness in using accpac on same machine. Thanks.
jack malone Network Administrator EAST TEXAS LIGHTHOUSE FOR THE BLIND dba HORIZON INDUSTRIES 903-595-3444 http://www.horizonind.com
I'm sure you know the 3ware ide RAID cards masqarade as SCSI cards. One consequence of this is they are not impacted by potential bugs in the IDE driver code. I believe the 3ware SATA RAID cards also masqarade as SCSI cards. In this case they will not impacted by bugs in the SATA (libata) driver code. I have not yet tried the 3ware SATA cards, but I read every message I see about 3ware and I have read nothing negative about there SATA cards. FYI: There is doc on the 3ware site that talks about the fastest config. of 3ware SATA. For tech. articles see: http://www.3ware.com/products/techlibrary.asp and in particular get http://www.3ware.com/linuxbenchmarks.htm (you will have to register). Greg -- Greg Freemyer
I am using a 9500S-12 under SuSe 9.1 32bit. Have not tried the 64bit driver as of yet. But I don't see any issues. But here's a question. What RAID level are you running? I was previously running RAID-5 for all my configurations and have since changed over to a RAID-0 since I back it up. I did a lot of testing with a LSI MegaRAID 320-2x and 8 15k 73gb SCSI drives in different configs. Under a RAID-5 I would see around 30MB/sec writes and around 250MB reads. Under a RAID-0 I would see 310MB/sec writes and a little over 380MB/sec writes. Now that is one hell of a difference. I am working towards changing over my 3-ware card config as I expect to see the same results. Brad Dameron SeaTab Software www.seatab.com On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 07:23, Jack Malone wrote:
I have had several of the 3 ware ide raid controlles in my machines over the past few years but never have used one of the sata raid controllers. I'm thinking that I'm having a speed problem with ide 3ware raid an want to try out the sata version. I have seen that several people have had problems with sata an want to make sure that if I install one an use it as the boot device that I want run into any problems. I plan to use the Escalade 9500S-8 Storage controller (RAID). Thanks for any info on this one. If this is not a good controller an can you recommend one that your using with good drifve speed. Our server here is has asus k8v 64 bit mother board with 3200 amd cpu in it. I have about 26 or so computers logging onto this server. Since our accounting software upgrade (accpac) we have been seeing some slow downs in accessing it over the network, an from what I can see it not a network/bandwidth issue nor a ram problem so im thinking it might be the ide harddrives an filesystem. also seem to have a slow backup backing up to dlt vs80 tape drive. Before the upgrade we were not experiencing this slowness in using accpac on same machine. Thanks.
jack malone Network Administrator EAST TEXAS LIGHTHOUSE FOR THE BLIND dba HORIZON INDUSTRIES 903-595-3444 http://www.horizonind.com
On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:45:45 -0800, Brad Dameron wrote:
I am using a 9500S-12 under SuSe 9.1 32bit. Have not tried the 64bit driver as of yet. But I don't see any issues. But here's a question. What RAID level are you running? I was previously running RAID-5 for all my configurations and have since changed over to a RAID-0 since I back it up.
I did a lot of testing with a LSI MegaRAID 320-2x and 8 15k 73gb SCSI drives in different configs. Under a RAID-5 I would see around 30MB/sec writes and around 250MB reads. Under a RAID-0 I would see 310MB/sec writes and a little over 380MB/sec writes. Now that is one hell of a difference. I am working towards changing over my 3-ware card config as I expect to see the same results.
Brad Dameron SeaTab Software www.seatab.com
The highest performing setup should be Raid 1+ 0 (Striped sets of mirrors). It takes twice as many drives as Raid 0, but you also get the best reliability. ie. a 3-disk Raid 0 should have roughly 3x the r/w perfomance on one drive. a 6-disk Raid 1+0 should have the same write performance as above, but twice the read performance because there are 6 spindles to read from simulataneously. fyi: The faster read performance may not show up in a simple dd type of read test. Greg -- Greg Freemyer
On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 09:45, Brad Dameron wrote:
I am using a 9500S-12 under SuSe 9.1 32bit. Have not tried the 64bit driver as of yet. But I don't see any issues. But here's a question. What RAID level are you running? I was previously running RAID-5 for all my configurations and have since changed over to a RAID-0 since I back it up.
I did a lot of testing with a LSI MegaRAID 320-2x and 8 15k 73gb SCSI drives in different configs. Under a RAID-5 I would see around 30MB/sec writes and around 250MB reads. Under a RAID-0 I would see 310MB/sec writes and a little over 380MB/sec writes. Now that is one hell of a difference. I am working towards changing over my 3-ware card config as I expect to see the same results.
Brad Dameron SeaTab Software www.seatab.com
Woops. To correct this. That is 380MB/sec Reads, not writes. Brad Dameron SeaTab Software www.seatab.com
At 11:57 AM 1/25/2005, Brad Dameron wrote:
On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 09:45, Brad Dameron wrote:
I am using a 9500S-12 under SuSe 9.1 32bit. Have not tried the 64bit driver as of yet. But I don't see any issues. But here's a question. What RAID level are you running? I was previously running RAID-5 for all my configurations and have since changed over to a RAID-0 since I back it up.
I
Hey thanks greg an brad for the replies. I had seen that article already greg, thanks for pointing it out again though. Brad to answer your question on raid level, In my test bench machine where i have been doing my backup testing I'm running raid level 0, i store a lot of stuff on that machine for easy access to me on the network, an its my test bed also. On the server that is being used in production its at raid lever 1 for the redundancy, if one drive fails the server says running til i can replace the failed drive. I now have an older 6000 or 7000 3ware card in the production server, can not remember which one off the top of my head, using raid 1 with 3 drives, the 3rd as a stand drive. I will setup with raid 1 when i get the 3WA-9500S-8 or the 3WA-9500S-8MI card. The 9500s-8 is out of stock with the people we get parts from for another week an half so i might have to wait til then or get the 9500s-8MI. Not sure the difference is between the two or if I will be able to tell a difference in the performance of them. again thanks for the info. jack Thanks jack
On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 10:23, Jack Malone wrote:
Hey thanks greg an brad for the replies. I had seen that article already greg, thanks for pointing it out again though.
Brad to answer your question on raid level, In my test bench machine where i have been doing my backup testing I'm running raid level 0, i store a lot of stuff on that machine for easy access to me on the network, an its my test bed also. On the server that is being used in production its at raid lever 1 for the redundancy, if one drive fails the server says running til i can replace the failed drive. I now have an older 6000 or 7000 3ware card in the production server, can not remember which one off the top of my head, using raid 1 with 3 drives, the 3rd as a stand drive. I will setup with raid 1 when i get the 3WA-9500S-8 or the 3WA-9500S-8MI card. The 9500s-8 is out of stock with the people we get parts from for another week an half so i might have to wait til then or get the 9500s-8MI. Not sure the difference is between the two or if I will be able to tell a difference in the performance of them.
again thanks for the info.
jack
You will not want to get the 9500s-8MI. It is a special connector that only works with a special hot-swap backplane. I ordered it and luckily the place I got it from new enough to make sure I had the backplane first. They saved me several days and some extra shipping costs. And the way it sounds a RAID-10 would be a good setup for you. Also another thing. I am using the 74GB 10k RPM 8MB cache Western Digital drives. But the new Maxtor 250GB 7200RPM 16MB cache drives seem to be a little faster. And with the slower RPM it would seem they might last a little longer. I just picked up 4 250's for $720. Have them in a RAID-10 software RAID. Seems pretty dang fast. Brad Dameron SeaTab Software www.seatab.com
On January 25, 2005 08:23 am, Jack Malone wrote:
server. Since our accounting software upgrade (accpac) we have been seeing some slow downs in accessing it over the network, an from what I can see it not a network/bandwidth issue nor a ram problem so im thinking it might be the ide harddrives an filesystem. also seem to have a slow backup backing up to dlt vs80 tape drive. Before the upgrade we were not experiencing this slowness in using accpac on same machine. Thanks.
Not to take this off-topic, but I'd make sure you understood what problem you were fixing first. Deciding where the bottleneck is (if there is one) shouldn't be hard with vmstat and iostat. For what it's worth, I've only used old 6xxx series, and have never had a problem. I wouldn't however buy them again due to their less than cooperative nature regarding other free projects. Chris
participants (4)
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Brad Dameron -
Chris Cameron -
Greg Freemyer -
Jack Malone