[conspire] Re: IDE RAID cards

[Rick Moen]

More in that thread (a reply from one of the other hardware engineers):

----<snip>----

> Hum, the 3ware cards.
>
> I've been eval'ing 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.)

The problem is the 3Ware cards are the only game in town.  No one else
has an 8-port card that works half as well.   (I wish Adaptec SATA cards
would come out now.)  The problems of the 3ware card are as follows:

1) Its RAID engine sucks.
2) It's only a 64/33 card, so it tops out around 6 drives in most
benchmarks.
3) 3ware's quality is not exactly the greatest.  (Be sure to run some
sort of file corruption test on a card, before you trust it.)

----<snip>----

The same guy also made the point earlier in the thread that, basically,
if a RAID card costs less than about $50/port, then it's _not_ actually
hardware RAID at all, but rather is implementing RAID entirely via the
(invariably sucky and proprietary) driver software.

If you're going for maximum redundant storage for the buck, what you
basically want is a high-throughput card (or cards) with the greatest
possible number of distinct ATA channels, without particularly caring
about alleged RAID features in the hardware, and then run the Linux MD
driver in its RAID5 mode.

-- 
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