On Wed, 17 May 2000, Thomas King wrote:
> Do anybody have some experiencies with ICP VORTEX or MYLEX Hardware-RAID
> controller?
> Which controller vendor should I prefer?
I had a great time with an Acceleraid 250 a while back. Performance was
quite sad for an LVD Ultra2 SCA Raid1 with two drives, but hotplugging
worked fine [I can only suppose HW Raid is slow :-)]. Only trouble I had
was with the backplane which decided to die on me the day we went into
production; I ended up swapping drive bays and that silenced it. From what
I can tell Mylex had great phone support (and Leonard did a great job on
the driver).
Nothing I can say on ICP personally. I've played with IBM ServeRAID, which
was slow as well, but not much slower than the Mylex. The Mylex has nice
firmwared configuration tools; IBM makes you reboot into a WinNT CD to
manage the drives. Mylex DACs are cheaper than IBM's option anyway.
Here's a tiobench I did on the IBM board with two IBM 10k drives on a
Netfinity 5000 chassis:
Size is MB, BlkSz is Bytes, Read and Write are MB/sec, Seeks are Seeks/sec
Dir Size BlkSz Thr# Read (CPU%) Write (CPU%) Seeks (CPU%)
----- ------ ------- ---- ------------- -------------- --------------
/usr/ 512 4096 1 11.3997 4.96% 6.99304 4.27% 149.242 0.77%
/usr/ 512 4096 2 11.8671 5.47% 6.95879 4.25% 195.759 0.97%
/usr/ 512 4096 4 12.2617 5.69% 6.94252 4.27% 223.820 1.14%
/usr/ 512 4096 8 12.3979 5.78% 6.93575 4.29% 250.433 1.41%
/usr/ 512 4096 16 12.3850 5.82% 6.93202 4.32% 277.247 1.44%
/usr/ 512 4096 32 12.1949 5.82% 6.92113 4.34% 297.975 1.50%
/usr/ 512 4096 64 11.7323 5.81% 6.87402 4.37% 314.251 1.59%
Low CPU, but low read/write speed too.
Here's what I got on two quantum drives (non-10k) on an astor II chassis
with an Acceleraid 250:
Size is MB, BlkSz is Bytes, Read and Write are MB/sec, Seeks are Seeks/sec
Dir Size BlkSz Thr# Read (CPU%) Write (CPU%) Seeks (CPU%)
----- ------ ------- ---- ------------- -------------- --------------
/site 256 4096 1 13.8466 7.02% 7.43652 6.81% 158.448 0.58%
/site 256 4096 2 15.5746 8.42% 7.44254 6.82% 185.678 0.67%
/site 256 4096 4 15.0061 8.31% 7.44146 6.87% 210.608 0.76%
/site 256 4096 8 14.8239 9.58% 7.44010 7.00% 234.381 0.98%
/site 256 4096 16 14.6758 10.9% 7.37989 7.01% 255.624 1.27%
/site 256 4096 32 14.5666 11.8% 7.27609 6.94% 276.284 1.49%
/site 256 4096 64 13.9222 11.9% 7.15170 6.80% 293.985 1.73%
If you want to know what slow means, I'll post some SW-Raid readbalanced
RAID1 benchmarks *grin* Mika rules!
Cheers,
--
/\ Christian Reis exists solely to answer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
\'`/ Async Free SW Development | http://async.com.br | +55 16 274 2497
