[conspire] IDE RAID cards

[Rick Moen]

Interesting post by a former hardware engineer from my old firm:

----<snip>----

Hum, the 3ware cards.

I've been evaling these cards and it's not been the
best experience. Granted, we're use to fibre and scsi,
performance-wise/dependability, so when we're doing
hardware raid-5, the 3ware cards sort of suck (use
software raid anyway, it seems to works better). On an
8 port 3ware, we're getting in the region of 25
meg/sec write (16k block, somewhat random (a little
prego)) at best. This is ext3 pretty much stock
settings from RedNeck 7.3, no opt elavator settings
etc.

Plus, although it's early in the products we're
evaling's lifecycle, we've had 1 out of 3 cards fail.
Bad luck or bad quality control.

I don't know how industrial strenght you need, but
fibre (qla2200, simple hub, fibre drives/chassis)
works much better (for more money, of course) and SCSI
isn't that much more than IDE for better drive quality
(IMO, ok, no flame bait), performance, and Linux
compatibility.

----<snip>----

Everyone seems to agree that Linux software RAID (the "md" driver from
the kernel) has become so good that many circumstances no longer warrant
a dedicated hardware-RAID host adapter.

-- 
Cheers,              First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing, for
Rick Moen            verbing weirds language.  Then, they arrival for the nouns
rick at linuxmafia.com  and I speech nothing, for I no verbs. - Peter Ellis