[PLUG] SCSI verses SATA RAID

Tony Schlemmer aschlemm at comcast.net
Sun Apr 2 03:38:52 UTC 2006


On Friday 31 March 2006 10:36, Jason R. Martin wrote:
> Aren't a lot of the cheaper/low-end SATA "RAID" controllers actually
> software raid and/or RAID 0 and 1 only?
>
> Jason
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At one company I worked at we wanted to have RAID-1 on several test systems 
that we had. The servers weren't super critical but it would be nice that 
they could stay up and no lose everything if a disk died. We looked at some 
of the cheaper SATA cards and they turned out to be some sort of funky 
hardware RAID just so we didn't bother with them.

7 months ago I put together a new workstation and got an LSI MegaRAID 150-4 
card which does real hardware RAID. I put a couple of Seagate NCQ SATA-150 
drives on the controller in a RAID-1 configuration. SuSE Linux detected the 
card out of the box and I didn't have to do anything really special to make 
it work with Linux. The only thing that must be done before the thing is 
useable is to go into the LSI setup program and create the logical disk 
volume.

I've been using nothing but SCSI for all of my systems since 1995 and so this 
last system I built to replace a dead workstation that didn't survive a move 
from Chicago is my first non-SCSI system in more than 10 years. I'm quite 
pleased with the system and Seagate SATA drives are much quieter than the 10K 
RPM  IBM Ultra-160 drives I had in my old workstation. I haven't done any 
speed comparisons or anything but the performance has been good enough for me 
so far. I didn't to any cost comparisons either but the OEM drive were $89.00 
a piece but I paid something like $235.00 for the LSI card so my solution 
wasn't exactly cheap since I spent over $400.00 just for the disk storage.

I'm still a hardware RAID SCSI bigot though if anyone wants me to build any 
kind of critical server systems for them though. :-D

Tony
 
-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at comcast.net



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