Hardware RAID Level & Performance

[Jure Pe_ar]

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 ...

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.


-- 

Jure Pečar
http://jure.pecar.org/

---
Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus
Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu
List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html