Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters

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?"

Re:32 pages? No thanks.

[tabkey12]

But RAID is nota one size fits all game - the detail of the article is extremely useful for people who will be tailoring their RAID to a specific application. Yes, this article is specialised, but I hardly see how reducing it to a list of three, relatively meaningless names is helping.

Drivers?

[sjbe]

While I've admittedly not read the entire article (it's really long) I couldn't find much info about drivers. It seems the author basically assumed one would be running windows, which for servers (the most likely place for a RAID array) is a pretty poor assumption. I've tried a number of SATA RAID cards on my linux server (SuSE 9.1) and keep getting driven back to SCSI due to crappy/non-existant driver issues. Thank god for Addonics SATA-SCSI adaptors [addonics.com] which work great and have saved me a bunch of money.

It's a nice article comparing performance but without a serious analysis of drivers along with it for Windows AND linux (and Mac if applicable) the article isn't complete. I don't really care which one is fastest if I can't run it on my system.

Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed.

[PDXNerd]

RAID 0 is not the most reliable thing in the world. Couple that with the unreliability of SATA (yes, I work in a Validation Lab and we go through dozens of these a day) you would *NEVER NEVER* want SATA in RAID 0 storing anything valuable. Swap, sure, but never data! That said, we test dozens of SATA raid controllers as well. The best performer in my experience has been the 3Ware 9500-8. Does it have many advanced features? How many people who will be using SATA raid really NEED those advanced features?

Re:Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters

[FreeLinux]

Troll my fanny. Have a read of the Linux SATA RAID faq. [linux.yyz.us] Notice all the claims that the RAID controllers aren't really hardware RAID controllers?

These claims are like the old claims that winmodems weren't really modems. Remember that? Strangely, now that someone figured it out, almost all winmodems work with Linux now and they are real modems again.

The fact that these RAID controllers are working RAID controllers for other operating systems but, don't work on Linux means that they really are hardware RAID controllers, contrary to the faq's claims. It means that LINUX does NOT support them. It means that no Linux developers have figured out how to make them work, yet.

I'm also willing to bet that Linux inability to work with many SATA RAID controllers is one of the primary, undisclosed, reasons that the majority of the controllers in the article weren't scored.

Oops, there's a problem. Let's just pretend it doesn't exist.

Re:Related Question

[LurkerXXX]

1,2) Tapes are of course way beyond what is called for in your situation. Tapes are for company servers where the data changes regularly and the system needs to be backed up quite often. Most of the data on your drive probably rarely changes, or changes slowly.

3) It can happen, believe me.

4) Home data can still be valuable and worth protecting.

5) Most of your data probably doesn't change that often, so DVDs would be fine. 100 DVDs can be had for around $50. That's not cheap for a student, but is probably worth trying to come up with when you think of how many hours you might spend trying to recreate that data. So:

1) Toss a DVD in to burn.

2) Go to class.

3) Go back to step one.

It won't be long until you have the bulk of your data backed up. Start with the most precious stuff.

6) Yes, a failing power supply can in some circumstances send a power surge through your system. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it can wreck a lot of your equipment. Plus a UPS will stop most but not *all* surges.

7) A good idea.

8) Use either DVDs or extra hard drives that are either offline or in another machine. Don't waste your money on tapes for your situation.

Re:Beware hardware RAID

[tialaramex]

Anecdotal because I'm not paid to do this stuff..

We bought a 3ware controller for a large and somewhat valuable datastore (high resolution images of Alan Turing's personal papers which include all the text available elsewhere plus handwritten annotations, scribbled diagrams, etc.)

In the end I only used it as a fast and not particularly full-featured ATA controller, running Linux software RAID on top because it was not only _faster_ in every test I could think of, but also simpler to set up and maintain.

There aren't many published comparisons of this sort of thing precisely because the low-end (PCI card etc.) hardware RAID manufacturers lose, and that means they won't be renewing their advertisements in your publication any time soon. In _theory_ they should win if your application is both disk I/O and computationally heavy, and thus you can't spare any CPU to run software RAID, but I've never seen a benchmark that could demonstrate this apparently obvious result with real hardware.

Re:The Article Never Explains What RAID 5 Is

[justins]

Now you could argue that a car review in Car and Driver doesn't bother explaining what a transmission does but RAID is several orders for magnitude more complex and esoteric.

Are you kidding?

RAID 5 can be explained in a few pages - the math, the implementation, the whole bit. Have you ever seen a technical drawing of a transmission? Modern slushboxes are about the most advanced mechanical engineering application that the average person ever comes in contact with (when they aren't at the airport).

You won't find an article that does most of the issues involved in designing and implementing a transmission justice. I know you just meant it as an example, but still. :)

Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed.

[fragzillax]

Gotta agree on the 8506's being flaky. I could not get them to work reliably with 3 different mobo's (one was a supermicro, very nice server board), after calls to supermicro, 3ware, and much hair pulling, I purchased the Highpoint listed in the article, and have been very happy with it, especially considering the price delta for the 8506-8's... So I currently use the HPT, and have 2 8506's sitting in boxes that I'll never use because of all the trouble they caused. Maybe time to head out to the 'ol gun club...

Re:waste of time and money.

[ltwally]

"Linux software RAID. Makes all this crap obsolete except for some specific cases."

So, you're saying that somehow your software RAID is calculating XOR bits and such without putting a serious hurt on your CPU and memory? Interesting.

"...I can have hot swapability..."

You're also saying that your motherboard has hot-swap capabilities built into it? Because it takes nothing short of specialized hardware controllers and BIOS's to be able to hot-plug a drive in. (ATA/SATA drive initialization is done during POST. Sure, Linux may do its own thing afterwards, but you cannot escape the legacy limitations of PC hardware.)

No offense... but seems to me that you're talking outta your arse, here. Software RAID offers only one thing in comparison to a good hardware RAID solution: price. In every other aspect hardware wins.. assuming your hardware RAID card isn't a POS.