Hardware RAID Level & Performance

[lst_hoe01 at kwsoft.de]

Zitat von Jure Pe_ar <pegasus at nerv.eu.org>:

> On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:50:56 +0100
> lst_hoe01 at kwsoft.de wrote:
>
> > If you want the benefits of host independant RAID and cheap SATA disks you
> > may have a look at this one :
> > http://www.icp-vortex.com/english/product/pci/rz_sata_8/8586rz_e.htm
>
> I'm actually very afraif of all those cards with plenty of cache and no
> battery backup for it. It has been proven (on certain notebook disks iirc)
> that even 2mb cache on disks themselves if not flushed properly on shutdown
> can be a disaster for the filesystem. Don't want to expirience what happens
> if you manage to create a 128mb large "hole" in your data. That's why you
> see write caching disabled everywhere by default. And write caching is what
> we in the mail business want the most ...
>
> 3ware has gotten the right idea recently and started offering batery backup
> units for their cards. I'm trying to get one to test ...

Than you are at the higher end (not SATA) :
http://www.icp-vortex.com/english/product/pci/rzu320/8524rz_e.htm

> Because of that (and because I already have FC infrastructure in place) I'm
> mostly interested in standalone disk enclosures doing their own raid with
> cheap sata drives and big caches with batteries.

Be aware that you must disable the *internal* cache of the SATA drives ...
Maybe http://www.infortrend.com is more interesting for you in this case.

Regards

Andreas

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