Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters 221
Robbedoeske writes "Tweakers.net has put online a comparison of nine Serial ATA RAID 5 adapters. Can the establishment counter the attack of the newcomers? Which of the contestants delivers the best performance, offers the best value for money and has the best featureset?"
32 pages? No thanks. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/32 [tweakers.net]
Where it has the executive summary:
Areca ARC-1120: highly recommended
RAIDCore BC4852: recommended
HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A: recommended
For several reasons, we will refuse recommendations on the remaing adapters in this comparison
I think that pretty much covers the jist of the article.
Don't plan on mixing Highpoint cards (Score:5, Informative)
When I removed the drives in windows, it booted up without problems. Highpoint has sent me diag tools to run rather than building this in their lab!
I'm not too impressed with them so far.
Re:Drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:5, Informative)
Both are nice cards, but I would not recommend them to anyone who does not have extensive PC hardware knowledge. They are fussy, carpicious and very hard to troubleshoot when they go wrong.
My thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
The RAIDCore BC4852 seems fastest for sequential reads/writes.
BOTH of these have linux support. The Areca supports: Mandrake (9.0),Red Hat (7.3, 8.0, 9.0, AS 3.0), Fedora Core (2, 2 AMD64), SuSE (7.3, 9.1 Pro, 9.0 SLES, 9.0 SLES AMD64)
The RAIDCore: Red Hat (9.0, AS 3.0), Fedora Core (1)
The Areca also supports Windows XP and Server 2003 64-bit versions and BSDs: 4.2R, 4.4R, 5.2.1 (incl. source).
Also, the Areca ARC-1160 (they finished testing after the original article was written, so it didn't make it into most of the text) appears at the top of all of the Index/performance tests, except for "Fileserver - Large Filesize - RAID 1/10" [tweakers.net] and "My SQL - Data Drive - RAID 1/10" [tweakers.net].
Re:Related Question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2, Informative)
From Page 2 of TFA:
Note: Since the original Dutch article was published in late January, we have finished tests of the 16-port Areca ARC-1160 using 128MB, 512MB and 1GB cache configurations and RAID 5 arrays of up to 12 drives. The ARC-1160 was using the latest 1.35 beta firmware. Furthermore, a non-disclosure agreement on the LSI MegaRAID SCSI 320-2E PCI Express x8 SCSI RAID adapter was lifted. The performance graphs have been updated to include the Areca ARC-1160 and LSI MegaRAID SCSI 320-2E results. Discussions of the results have not been updated, however. The results should be self-explanatory.
SCSI vs SATA (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps, though personally I've had far more trouble getting SATA (and IDE) drives to work than SCSI drives and I've used both extensively. Driver issues mostly. SCSI's performance is better in multi-user systems, it's easy to set up, drivers tend to be less problematic especially on systems other than Windows, and it can have more devices attached. People claim it's more reliable though I have no evidence of this, and frankly am a bit dubious of the claim. SATA is also easy to set up and is a lot cheaper, though the drivers are still less ubiquitous than with SCSI and performance doesn't match SCSI yet for multi-user systems. (on a single user system it doesn't matter much)
That said, the next generation of SCSI is Serial Attached SCSI [adaptec.com] which is compatible with SATA. A SAS controller will be able to use SATA drives if you don't need the extra features of SAS. SCSI isn't going away, it's just adapting.
Re:Drivers? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously if you're looking at a raid 5 solution, you're moving more towards higher end stuff, so it would be hard to recommend anything that performs poorly there. Rather dissapointing, but probably not that surprising since their SATA cards seem very similar to the ATA cards, so I'm sure they're throwing performance out the window there somewhere =/
waste of time and money. (Score:3, Informative)
Linux software RAID. Makes all this crap obsolete except for some specific cases.
I can have as many drives as I want, I can have hot swapability, I can have hot spares and all sorts of fun stuff.
Add LVM on top of that and you have a solution that is much superior then going out and buying any raid controller, except for the most fastest.
Linux software raid is actually VERY nice, I don't know of any OS that has better setup.
Re:Eight or Nine? (Score:2, Informative)
The results of the LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4 and MegaRAID SATA 150-6 have been combined in the graphs since there is basicly no performance difference between to two in configurations up to four drives.
Re:Why would RAID require drivers? (Score:1, Informative)
You're confusing 2 things. These adapters are raid cards, and they are disk controllers.
You need a driver to talk to a disk controller, even a plain regular one. Linux and BSD drivers are hard to find for some disk controllers.
You are thinking of some scsi raid enclosures where the enclosure manages the raid, and as far as the computer is concerned, the computer sees one scsi disk, without knowing any details behind the scenes. The computer only needs a regular scsi card. This raid enclosure can be easily used with many operating systems, since the operating system only needs to know how to talk to a scsi disk, and most do.
my 2 cents (Score:2, Informative)
The Article Never Explains What RAID 5 Is (Score:4, Informative)
There are so many different flavors of RAID it can be hard to keep them straight if you're not working with them every day.
Anyway there are good explanations of RAID here [techtarget.com] and here [prepressure.com].
Re:Beware hardware RAID (Score:5, Informative)
If you are dumb enough to use RAID as a substitute for backing up, that is.
Re:SCSI vs SATA (Score:5, Informative)
I put SCSI in my servers (RAID or otherwise) when I want the box to run for years and years under heavy load and not have to worry about replacing drives regularly.
With SCSI, your paying for the quality control/quality assurance more than anything else.
From what I understand a good SATA drive has the same TTL quality as a good IDE drive, just faster performance.
Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed. (Score:3, Informative)
Most of our support has been through a VAR (who sucks too, but that's a separate rant), but when we talked to 3ware and told them how we were using the arrays (for database storage), they immediately went, "Ooh...uhh...that's...not really a good idea..." Even they admitted that the SATA arrays are really for very light-duty use only. (I blame our old VP of technology, who always wanted to go the cheap route on everything.)
Oh, and if you want to upgrade the controller's firmware? 3ware tells you to boot off a DOS-formatted floppy. This is not enterprise-level stuff.
Not hardware RAID (Score:3, Informative)
See my SATA RAID FAQ [linux.yyz.us] for a listing of the most common SATA chipsets which are sold as RAID, but are really software RAID (a.k.a. "fake RAID").
I'm also rather amazed that this wasn't mentioned in the review, but I admit I did not read all the of the 32 pages.