On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Piete Brooks wrote:
>
> I'm a fan of SW RAID (a motherboard with 3 LVD busses, 2 EIDE busses, and 1 W
> bus kind of satisfies our disk IO requirements), but I've being pressured to
> buy some HW RAID for our "main" NFS servers.
>
> The suggestion is either AMI 438 (which I was suprised not to see mentioned in
> http://linas.org/linux/raid.html) or Mylex 1164 "Extreme".
> Would users of those systems (or others) agree with the choice ?
> [ we're getting a box with 6 * 4 slot backplanes to hold "hot swap" disks,
> and are thinking of on (or maybe two) backplanes per server, so a single
> LVD bus is likely to keep us happy -- nothing big !
> Probably RAID5 over the 4 disks.
> ]
I haven't seen the 438, but I have a couple 428s that I'm trying to
return. I've been completely unable to push over 10 MB/sec *total*
through them, even with 5 barracudas attached, each of which is faster
than 10 MB/sec. I've tried RAID 0, 1, and 5 -- none was fast enough to be
useful for our application. It felt like the CPU on the RAID board was
saturated, but that might just be my imagination.
The Mylex ExtremeRAID looks pretty cool, and the benchmark results
(Windows) that the have on their web site make it look a lot faster than
the AMI boards.
In the end, I think we're going to end up using software RAID5 here --
with a 5 drive RAID5 array on a single UW SCSI channel (more controllers
on order :-), I'm seeing about 25 MB/sec reading and writing, and well
over 400 seeks/second with bonnie. This is on a P2/350 with 256 MB of RAM
and an Intel N440BX motherboard, with a Symbios 53c876 on the motherboard.
Scott
