I've been using 3Ware. It works okay. Use the 9500S for PCI-X and the 9650SE for PCI-E. The main drawback to 3Ware is that they don't support VMWare ESX. They have a driver, but it sucks. If you want to run that you need to use Adaptec-SAS or Areca. But then you run into problems with the 2Tb limit of VMWare. I tried the Adaptec 3805. Works okay but does not have a 2Tb carving function so you have to run multiple small arrays under ESX. I've not tried Areca but have heard good things about them.
I've had nothing but problems with Promise and Highpoint controllers, but that was a few years ago by now. Maybe they improved. I suspect not. For partitions > 2Tb you need to use Guid not MBR volumes. That means you can't boot off the large partition unless you are running an Intel Itanium based system with it's special version of Windows. 3Ware 9650 has a feature to create a smaller boot partition from a large array that looks like it's own drive to Windows. That saves you from dedicating drives just to boot from. Also - beware of running very large Dynamic volumes under Vista. It does not like them. You need to use Windows 2003 or 2008 for that. I was trying to configure a 10Tb volume and it became corrupted when rebooting under Vista. I switched to Server 2008 and the problems went away. My largest array is 16 - 1.5Tb SATA drives that gives just under 19TB usable using Raid-6. I use that for organizing backups before I archive them. I get 3-5 Gig per minute throughput if I turn on write caching. I'm lucky to get 1Gpm with caching off. I got the Adaptec 3805 (8-port) for $300 on eBay with the battery backup module. I've seen the 3Ware 9650SE 16 port go for < $500. You definitely need the BBU. I've already lost one array when a machine blue-screened under heavy IO and did not have one installed. All the controllers support adding additional drives and migrating the array to include them so you can increase capacity. 3Ware also supports incrementally swapping drives out for larger capacity ones, but you need a custom script from Support to expand the array to include the extra space. I've not tried that yet. Keep in mind that the cluster size you start with has to accommodate the largest partition size you will use. That is to say that you can't format with a 512 byte cluster and later expand to a partition > 2Tb. So I started out my 19Tb partition with an 8192 byte cluster even though I did not have all 16 drives in the initial configuration. On a final note, getting data in and out of a large array can take a while. I started using USB 2.0 external SATA Docking stations, but they maxed out at ~ 20 Mb/sec. I switched to ESATA and that number rose to 50 - 80 Mb/sec depending on the drive. HTH -Dave Walton On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Curt Raymond <[email protected]> wrote: > Anybody got experience with add-on SATA controllers? > I want to add a bunch of storage to one of my systems and eliminate a stack > of SCSI external drives (They're LOUD) and SATA drives look like the > cheaper/faster way to go, plus I've only got one open IDE slot. > > Now remember I'll be editing video on this system, a cheap/crappy controller > isn't acceptable. And yes of course I want to do this on the cheap, well as > cheap as possible anyway... > > -Curt > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > <http://okiebenz.com/pipermail/mercedes_okiebenz.com/attachments/20090422/6ea630b1/attachment.html> > _______________________________________ > http://www.okiebenz.com > For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com > To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ > > To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: > http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com > _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
