Wow, thats a great reply thanks, though those cards are probably way more
serious than I need. The computer they'd go into is an old HP xw8000 I salvaged
from work. I don't care for anything other than RAID 0 for my use, all my
material will be from timecode source so if it goes away I just redigitize...
When you say 1 Gig per minute, you're meaning 16.6MB/s? (or 17 I guess if your
GB is 1024MB). Thats not really fast enough for what I want you're using these
in a server sort of environment?
Video is really a world unto itself. I'd want to do 2 streams of uncompressed
SD at least, 3 would be better so I'll need 50-75MB/s sustained throughput, 4
SATA drives should be able to handle that pretty easily. My 4 SCSI drives will
do 6.
I don't need huge storage at home 2TB would be plenty. If I get a really big
project I could use a system at work. The big system in my classroom is 32TB
and capable of 400MB/s. It scales all the way up to 384TB which would be
4800MB/s total bandwidth. With a 10Gb connection we've clocked clients at
500MB/s... Its pretty amazing.
You're right about USB 2, it sucks for data transfer, firewire 400 is faster.
USB 2 is bus adjudicated too so if you've got a USB 2 printer it'll suck up
half the bandwidth, got a USB 2 scanner? Then each device gets 1/3 the
bandwidth if its doing something or not... Cruel joke that USB 2.
-Curt
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:06:25 -0400
From: dave walton <walton.d...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MBZ] SATA controller?
To: Mercedes Discussion List <mercedes@okiebenz.com>
Message-ID:
<1ec5633a0904221406r68d97fb9mc73216e88b569...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://okiebenz.com/pipermail/mercedes_okiebenz.com/attachments/20090422/ba20fdb5/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
