aragonx@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hello all, I had a drive failure a few months back so I decided it was time to rework my home server's storage. Now I have 5 750GB SATA dives and now I need some advice on how to set things up. My original idea was to put them in a RAID 5 configuration. This sounded good until I started researching RAID controller cards. It looks like it will cost me $520 to get a good PCI-E card (3Ware 8 port). I don't think I want to spend that much if I don't have to. My goals are two fold. 1) I want to get some redundancy in case of a drive failure. 2) I want to increase my performance. I have benchmarked my read and write performance to and from this server. Using Samba, I seem to be able to get about 50Mb/sec reads and 40Mb/sec writes. I am on a gig network and would like to be able to max out the cards (90Mb/sec is what I get at work). So, the question is, what should I do? 1) Bite the bullet and get the hardware RAID controller. Will this give me the performance I want? 2) Go with a software RAID 5. Will I lose performance with this configuration? If I use this but only get modest performance gains, that would be acceptable. 3) Go with some other software RAID level. Any help would be appreciated. --- Will Y.
Will,I can't help with the software side, but I have a 3ware 8 port myself and here are the stats I am getting from my RAID 5:
(output of tw_cli)Unit UnitType Status %RCmpl %V/I/M Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVrfy
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ u0 RAID-5 OK - - 64K 3259.56 OFF ON Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial --------------------------------------------------------------- p0 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WMASYXXXXX p1 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WMASYXXXXX p2 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WMASYXXXXX p3 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WMASYXXXXX p4 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WCAS8XXXXX p5 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WCAS8XXXXX p6 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WCAS8XXXXX p7 OK u0 465.76 GB 976773168 WD-WCAS8XXXXX Name OnlineState BBUReady Status Volt Temp Hours LastCapTest --------------------------------------------------------------------------- bbu On No Testing OK OK 0 24-Nov-2008 Timing Statistics: /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 11640 MB in 2.00 seconds = 5830.68 MB/sec /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 152 MB in 3.00 seconds = 50.64 MB/secmy biggest bottle neck right now is the write-cache is off due to a battery test that is being done. Total cost for the card (and battery backup) was about 575.00. The card, from new egg is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116054
Another note, 3ware has good support in Linux, and is very nice and easy to manage if you do go that route. I will leave it to the DMraid/software RAID guys to answer for that though
~Seann
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