Randall J. Parr wrote:
Soenke von Stamm wrote:
Ok, thanks to all you guys, I have found the new LSI MegaRAID 300-8x
to fit my needs most closely. They are becoming available now and I
have enough time to validate one in another soon-to-arrive GX28. It
has the connectors on the back side, but it's short enough and it
seems to be a decent performer (judging from the Areca card
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557 which uses the same XOR hardware -
I don't trust the Areca hardware though (fan) and have very good
experiences with LSI for years now).
Unfortunately the MegaRAID 300-4x doesn't seem to be out yet but the
price difference is a minor issue. Nice feat is support of NCQ btw,
got four NCQ disks on my desk already :-)
Please let us know if the 300-8x does, in fact, provide similar
performance to the Areca. I had been looking at the Areca (because of,
in part, the review you mentioned) but have been a little leary. I have
had very good experience with LSI MegaRAID with SCSI and would like to
try the 300-8x (if performance IS as described).
I chose the LSI because I couldn't find anyone here in the UK that sells
the Arcea or the Tekram variant (perhaps they are the same, don't know).
When it comes to performance I'm more than happy. The card is installed
in a Tyan 2885 MB (PCI-X slot, of course :) ). Previously I had an
Adaptec 2410 (66MHz, 64 bit) and the performance difference between
these two controllers is huge. Ok, the test I did is VERY inscientific
but I got the performance boost I wanted.
The test was to copy a big file (700MB) from one stripe to another on
the same controller (which means each controller had 4 drives connected
to it and configured as two RAID-0 stripes). The file system used on the
Adaptec was Reiserfs and on the LSI XFS. The copy took 13s on the
Adaptec and a whopping 1.3 on the LSI. Guess if I was bouncing around
the walls :). This can of course be a combination of controller/file
system, which is what I suspect. Is Reiserfs known to be slow?
Also... I checked their drivers page but do not see a Debian and/or
generic Linux driver. Do you know one is available?
The LSI MegaRAID 300-8x is supported from kernel 2.6.10 and forward. It
uses the megaraid_mbox driver which of course means it's a small hell to
install Debian when that controller is the only one in your system you
have any disks connected to. Debian installer uses kernel 2.6.8 which
does not support the card (although it loads a driver called megaraid).
So to summarise, the card works ok and is fast but can be problematic to
install Debian on.
/Johan
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