Author Topic: Hardware RAID cards... (Read 362 times)

Grits · « **on:** May 09, 2005, 05:45:48 PM »

What kinda of hardware RAID cards are you guys using and what did it cost?

llama · « **Reply #1 on:** May 09, 2005, 05:53:05 PM »

Pretty much anything from Promise is good stuff. I have a lot of Promise cards in use with clients for servers, and they work flawlessly.

I don't recemmend them for a speed boost - just redundant drive reliability. Honestly, I thing RAID for speed is just foolish; you get a real-world improvement of like 5%, say the articles I've read, in exchange for more cost, heat, and noise.

-Llama

Grits · « **Reply #2 on:** May 09, 2005, 06:54:48 PM »

Are all Promise cards hardware RAID? The problem I am having is lots of info describes the different levels of RAID that a particular card can run, but few clearly say if its hardware or software RAID.

I am going to set up a RAID 1 for redundancy.

Kev367th · « **Reply #3 on:** May 10, 2005, 09:18:13 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by llama
Pretty much anything from Promise is good stuff. I have a lot of Promise cards in use with clients for servers, and they work flawlessly.

I don't recemmend them for a speed boost - just redundant drive reliability. Honestly, I thing RAID for speed is just foolish; you get a real-world improvement of like 5%, say the articles I've read, in exchange for more cost, heat, and noise.

-Llama

Try running SCSI U320 as RAID 0, speed increase quite noticeable.

Wish he had said what kind of RAID he was thinking about, i.e. IDE, SATA or SCSI.

Grits · « **Reply #4 on:** May 10, 2005, 11:06:02 AM »

I was looking at SATA, but I havent bought anything yet.

Kev367th · « **Reply #5 on:** May 10, 2005, 02:28:45 PM »

IDE/SATA definately cheaper but nowhere near the performance of U320 SCSI.
Just gotta decide how much your willing to part with money ways.

StarOfAfrica2 · « **Reply #6 on:** May 10, 2005, 05:39:52 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Kev367th
Try running SCSI U320 as RAID 0, speed increase quite noticeable.

Wish he had said what kind of RAID he was thinking about, i.e. IDE, SATA or SCSI.

This is a copy/paste from an Anandtech test where they measured speeds of various setups, including a single RaptorII vs a RAID 0 Raptor II setup.

Quote

.......there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

When Intel introduced ICH5, and now with ICH6, they effectively brought RAID to the mainstream, pushing many users finally to bite the bullet and buy two hard drives for "added performance". While we applaud Intel for bringing the technology to the mainstream, we'd caution users out there to think twice before buying two expensive Raptors or any other drive for performance reasons. Your system will most likely run just as fast with only one drive, but if you have the spare cash, a bit more reliability and peace of mind may be worth setting up a RAID-1 array.

They also tested the theory at Toms Hardware, and I tend to trust Tom's. They claimed to almost double the speed of a single drive using a dual drive RAID 0 array. However, they did claim the PCI card controllers are far superior to the onboard chips on many newer boards, and they only tested the setups with office files and programs. No gaming tests with RAID setups.

Here's both links

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=10

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20021112/index.html

Personally, I cant for the life of me see why anyone would want to spend double the money for two hard drives and get absolutely no redundancy as a backup. But thats just my opinion.

BTW, I agree 100% on the use of SCSI vs IDE. While Tom's claims that modern IDE runs almost equal to SCSI, long time use and trust in their reliability and speed leave me a big fan of SCSI for a RAID setup.

Kev367th · « **Reply #7 on:** May 10, 2005, 06:31:42 PM »

Would respectfully disagree -
U320 SCSI outpaces any IDE/SATA setup quite easily.
SATA 150, ATA 133 , close to U160.

StarOfAfrica2 · « **Reply #8 on:** May 10, 2005, 06:33:44 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Kev367th
Would respecfully disagree -
U320 SCSI outpaces any IDE/SATA setup quite easily.
SATA 150, ATA 133 , close to U160.

I personally agree with you, I'm just saying that alot of the currently reviewed IDE setups are being advertised as almost the same speed as SCSI.

llama · « **Reply #9 on:** May 12, 2005, 07:04:15 PM »

Since someone asked, I was talking about Promise Parallel ATA cards.

-Llama

Schutt · « **Reply #10 on:** May 13, 2005, 03:30:00 AM »

The problem with a RAID 0 is not that you get no redundancy. It is that the reliability of your storage goes DOWN alot.

It depends on the way you calculate, but for data integrety you rely on 2 hard drives now which results in at a least 50% higher chance of data loss.

Say one hard drive you rely on 5 years of problem free use, raid 0 make that 3 years at most. Now if you put 4 drives in a raid 0 it gets worse, but not much.

That is why comercial raid systems use at least raid5. They want to get faster but not loose reliability.

LePaul · « **Reply #11 on:** May 13, 2005, 10:22:23 AM »

I was just reading about RAID setups, pros/cons on on the Knowledge Base a few days ago. Here's the link...its about setting up MS SQL 2000 & RAID Levels.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/optimsql/odp_tun_1_87jm.asp

Most places I've worked at have either 1 or 5 with redundancy always trumping performance.