DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2005-09
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Re: More on vinum woes
:
:Dave Hayes wrote:
:
:>Might I ask the exact model number of the 3ware card(s) you use for
:>RAID 5? If I do things this way I've got to buy two at the same time,
:>and I'd like to be accurate. ;)
:>
:I've used two 6400 and one 7800 and I can only recommend AGAINST them.
:Out of those 3, two (one 6400 and the 7800) kept kicking out drives out
:of arrays for no understandable reason (means you could rebuild the
:array with the very same drives after that only to have it kick out
:another drive soon thereafter).
:
:For cards, that cost 500$, that's simply inacceptable to me. And the
:support didn't even answer any mails and searches on Google showed I'm
:by no means alone with this issue (and others didnt get any help from
:3ware either, aside of a few that were being told to dump the NVRAM of
:the controller but usually without a howto...).
Its going to depend on how old the drives are, for PATA IDE. It's
only the last few years where PATA IDE drives have settled down into
a semblence of a reliable interface standard from the drive side, but
even then I wouldn't trust PATA (parallel ATA, i.e. standard IDE cable)
for *anything* that needed serious uptime. SATA is different, however.
At least on the drive side its completely different. On the motherboard
chipset side its still a mess because the idiots are trying to maintain
compatibility with the basic IDE chipset protocols, which have been
broken from the day they were introduced. But a 3ware SATA card will
bypass that so it shouldn't be a problem.
Everyone I know who was using SCSI for reliability 5 years ago is now
switching to SATA, simply because they can no longer justify the
ridiculous price premium for SCSI. Nearly all the RAID storage vendors
now have SATA/IDE-support precisely due to this change in the demand
curve.
$500 is the cost of an 8-port (900 series) SATA RAID controller. If
I have 8 SATA drives $500 would be a small price to pay to build a
reliable storage subsystem out of them, especially considering that it
would cost an extra $1000 if not more if those were SCSI drives instead
of SATA drives. I'll price it out for you right now:
Maxtor 250GB SATA drive: $100
Seagate 250GB SATA drive: $112
Seagate cheetah 300GB HD: $900
Maxtor 300GC SCSI 10K rpm: $1095
See the problem? And that's after spending 30 minutes trying to find
SCSI drives on the net. I don't even believe those prices... I KNOW I
can get better prices then $900 for a 300GB SCSI drive, if I spend
another hour looking. When I researched SCSI drives last year they
were costing about 100% premium. Now the best deals I can find are in
the 200% range, or worse, and fewer vendors sell them.
There's no point buying SCSI any more when you can buy a second
(or third) entirely redundant RAID array full of SATA drives for the same
price. If SCSI only cost, say, a 20% premium, I would probably
still be using it. But it doesn't. Even the best deals the premium
often exceeds 100% and short of spending a lot of time working at it
they generally exceed 200%.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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