SATA RAID controller recommendations

Burke, Thomas G. tg.burke at ngc.com
Fri Aug 5 17:44:22 UTC 2005


A lot of programs use tmp, but the big increase in performance would be
to ensure that it is on a separate drive from the rest of the program &
files being used, such that there is separate disk IO, and one does not
have to wait for another.

	-Tom 

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Gavin McDonald
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2005 1:31 PM
To: 'General Red Hat Linux discussion list'
Subject: RE: SATA RAID controller recommendations

further to that, Would a separate partition for /tmp be in order?

I remember a message about two weeks ago alluding to the fact that by
putting /tmp on its own partition, Nagarjuna Rao Cherukuri noticed an
increase in performance.  Should I take this as a rule, or an anecdote?

Regards,
-G


-----Original Message-----
From: Burke, Thomas G. [mailto:tg.burke at ngc.com]
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2005 10:05 AM
To: me at gavitron.com; General Red Hat Linux discussion list
Subject: RE: SATA RAID controller recommendations

I have no direct experience, but I have been told that it took leavng an
IDE in to do the installs, so the installers could detect.  However, he
installed to the SATA's, and set them up as the boot partitions.  He
claimed it worked after that, but I can't recall if he left the IDE in
or if he took it out.  It may have amounted to using the ide strictly as
a boot device (and maybe swap space).  He also told me that he was
seeing ~25-50% disk performance improvement using the SATA's.

Sorry, that's the only intel I've got.

	-Tom 

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Gavin McDonald
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2005 12:56 PM
To: 'General Red Hat Linux discussion list'
Subject: RE: SATA RAID controller recommendations

Just to add my 2c:

I recently tried getting RHEL to work on a dual-opteron ASUS board, with
dual onboard SATA hardware raid controllers. One was part of the NVIDIA
chipset, the other was a "Silicon Image" Controller.  Long story short,
I replaced the SATA drives with IDE drives instead.

To start with, I couldn't boot a stable kernel off of the original Red
CDs (Box-Set), so I d/l the latest RHEL3 ISOs, which at least booted.
(We're a '3' shop until I can migrate _everything_ to 4...).  Now with a
stable kernel, the Mfr-Supplied Driver disks were still useless.  Not
once was I able to boot to the install GUI, unless I had an IDE drive
attached as well.

If you can go to RHEL4, the controllers are detected, and the drives
appear in disk druid,  however, even with the hardware BIOS setup for
RAID0 or RAID1, the druid shows 2 separate drives...

So that was my tale of woe, If someone has had better experiences with
either controller, or perhaps notices a flaw in my logic, (gasp!) please
feel free to tell me so. :)  (This is after all, a mailing list ;)

Regards,
-G


-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Chris
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 3:15 PM
To: redhat-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: SATA RAID controller recommendations

Michael's Stationery----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Cohn
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 2:54 PM
Subject: SATA RAID controller recommendations

> I just saw your post from back in November regarding SATA RAID 
> controller recommendations.
>
> http://info.ccone.at/INFO/Mil-Archives/redhat/Nov-2004
>  /msg00119.html
>
> What controller did you wind up using?  I just purchsaed a Dell 
> PowerEdge 420sc with 2x80gb SATA drives and would like to add a 
> hardware RAID controller.  My plan is to run either Fedora 3/4 or 
> SuSe.

Michael,

By far the best SATA RAID controllers with great support for Linux come
from

3WARE.  If you only have 2 drives, you can get away with their basic
(~$120)

model which can do RAID-0 and RAID-1, the 8006-2LP.  It works great!  We
have everything they make from the basic 2-port model all the way up to
a 12-port models which run our 3TB storage backup systems.

Stay away from Adaptec and Promise controllers.  Promise controllers
have serious issues with drivers and stability, while Adaptec outright
abandons brand new products and doesn't provide almost any Linux
support.  We had to toss several dozen of their 'brand new' zero channel
SCSI RAID 2015S controllers because they announced that they would not
provide drivers for kernel 2.6 - meaning FC2 and above, RHEL 4, etc.
They seem to be a "Windows

only" shop these days.  I know it has nothing to do with SATA, but as a
company in general I wouldn't buy any of their products anymore, not
after spending thousands on controllers that we had to replace less than
6 months later because Adaptec decided they were going to support
Windows only.

Chris 


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