Dedicated RAID5 PC

[TheDaishi]

Hi,

A friend of mine wants to build his own NAS box using 250Gb SATA drives.
If he were to use a software RAID5 card (no XOR chip) , what sort of CPU speed would be required to do the number crunching for 4 drives?

Also, is there any point is going above 4 drives if you don't have PCI-X?

Finally, anybody know who's making SATA RAID cards that support the new NCQ features?

Thanks,

Jim.

 

[CrashX]

I have a friend that used the Highpoint RocketRaid 1640 with 4x Seagate 300GB drives. It is an $85 card with no onboard XOR. He is using a 700MHz P3 running Linux and he hasn't had any complaints.

 

[TheDaishi]

OK, so pretty much any of the budget CPUs out there (Sempron, Duron, Celeron) will do then, even if we're running XP Pro on there?

Does he have any benchmarks?

Ta,

Jim.

 

[jose]

What is his proposed specs ? raid 5 on the pci slot is a waste of time. 1 - 10K scsi drive will beat the performance.

But if he's looking for space vs speed then why not go w/ a NF4 mobo that has support for raid5.

I have Dell servers w/ 6 - 10k scsi drives that are very slow....

It all depends on what your needs are, you need to list his requirements.

 

[TheDaishi]

Requirements:
Space and reliability, but without backups.

Speed not really much of an issue, will be running over 100BaseT and 54G.

I didn't know NF4 boards had RAID5 (I've still got i845)
The RAID5 controller on NF4, any good?
What's the driver support like in regards to drive failure, RAID level/size migration?

J.

 

[TheDaishi]

Hmmm,

NF4 boards appear to be s939 only?
Which means expensive board, RAM and CPU.
Are there any budget s939 CPUs yet?

Why would RAID5 be a waste of time on PCI?
33Mhz/32bit PCI slots should be able to push ~130MB/s and there won't be anything else on the PCI bus.

Ta,

J.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: TheDaishi
Hmmm,

NF4 boards appear to be s939 only?

ATM, yes. However, I do not believe the RAID controllers on the NF4 do RAID5...

Which means expensive board, RAM and CPU.
Are there any budget s939 CPUs yet?

The Athlon64 2800+ isn't too bad... it's only expensive compared to those super-low-end S754 Semprons they just put out with 128K of cache. The low-end S939 boards aren't much more than the S754 ones, and it's the same RAM...

Why would RAID5 be a waste of time on PCI?
33Mhz/32bit PCI slots should be able to push ~130MB/s and there won't be anything else on the PCI bus.

It's not. That guy has no clue what he's talking about (1 10KRPM SCSI drive is faster than RAID5? Not in STR... it is a *little* faster in seek time -- if you're doing one I/O at a time...)

A 4-disk RAID5 will come close to saturating the PCI bus by itself, though.

 

[TheDaishi]

Dammit, I hate it when you write a long detailed reply and it all gets lost...

 

[TheDaishi]

Cheers Matt,

In summary of what was lost.
Everything you said is right.

But here's the game (if there wasn't one, why would I be playing?)

The Buffalo Terastation is £600
4x250Gb WD drives w/ 1KBaseT
I have not yet found any performance benchmarks.

The PC equivalent must of course be cheaper and cheaper enough to balance it against the greater effort required.
Although versatility balances out a lot of the effort (it can run his MP3 server for the Phillips Streamium box)

Right, copy, paste, post...

Ta,

J.

 

[jose]

NF4 w/ raid5:
http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136151

The original poster didn't list anything about what the system would be used for multi-user, personel use, file server, video editing ???? What ??

I've reconfigured enterprise databases on old dell servers w/ multiple tables in the millions of records. It take 5 times the time required w/ a perc2 scsi controller w/ 6 - 10k scsi drives
as opposed to a single 15K 75g drives. I'm talking 20mins compared to 2hrs... Another thing the op should consider is how hard the ide drives will be hit. Will he have a hot spare ?
How fast can the controller rebuild the array ?

The original poster didn't even say whether this is for a bus or personel use. As far as anyone needing raid5, most of the time it's for business, most ppl who need raid5 go w/ a hardware implementation, the op first started asking about software raid 5 talking about sucking.
..
If you need raid 5 then get a 64bit pci-x motherboard, w/ either a 3Ware or LSI sata raid5 pci-x controller.

Matthias99, I don't think you have a clue, (5X slower)did the op say he what he was doing ? video editing, file serving, multi/single user ???

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: TheDaishi
Cheers Matt,

In summary of what was lost.
Everything you said is right.

But here's the game (if there wasn't one, why would I be playing?)

The Buffalo Terastation is £600
4x250Gb WD drives w/ 1KBaseT
I have not yet found any performance benchmarks.

The PC equivalent must of course be cheaper and cheaper enough to balance it against the greater effort required.
Although versatility balances out a lot of the effort (it can run his MP3 server for the Phillips Streamium box)

Right, copy, paste, post...

Ta,

J.

GBP600 (which is what, ~USD$1000?) without drives? You can go cheaper than that (at least in the US) with a dedicated PC server. Of course, it won't be as plug-and-play, but you get a lot more flexibility.

A NAS device and a full storage server are really different solutions for different problems.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: jose
NF4 w/ raid5:
http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136151

That board has a secondary SATA controller built in with RAID5 (probably hanging off the PCIe bus). The onboard SATA RAID (in the NF4 chipset) is only RAID0/1/10.

The original poster didn't list anything about what the system would be used for multi-user, personel use, file server, video editing ???? What ??

This is, indeed, critical information. I had assumed he mostly wanted to use this as mirrored backup storage/fileserver use (with either 1 or a few users). Doing video editing on a RAID5 array makes little sense.

I've reconfigured enterprise databases on old dell servers w/ multiple tables in the millions of records. It take 5 times the time required w/ a perc2 scsi controller w/ 6 - 10k scsi drives
as opposed to a single 15K 75g drives. I'm talking 20mins compared to 2hrs...

Which is meaningless without more information. Something is seriously wrong with your SCSI controller or setup -- or else you were hammering the other drives on the controller at the same time, starving the database rebuild.

Another thing the op should consider is how hard the ide drives will be hit. Will he have a hot spare ?
How fast can the controller rebuild the array ?

IDE drives don't fail that often. The odds of getting a second failure before the array is rebuilt (usually just a few hours) are extraordinarily small (but nonzero, even with SCSI). You should be backing up your data regardless, since no amount of disk mirroring will protect you against user error or catastrophic disasters.

The original poster didn't even say whether this is for a bus or personel use. As far as anyone needing raid5, most of the time it's for business, most ppl who need raid5 go w/ a hardware implementation, the op first started asking about software raid 5 talking about sucking.

Well, I went with hardware RAID5 for my personal files, but maybe I'm paranoid.

Software RAID5 isn't that bad considering how cheap it is these days.

..
If you need raid 5 then get a 64bit pci-x motherboard, w/ either a 3Ware or LSI sata raid5 pci-x controller.

Overkill if you don't need the better performance. A 4-drive IDE/SATA RAID5 will work just fine on PCI, if it's by itself.

Matthias99, I don't think you have a clue, (5X slower)did the op say he what he was doing ? video editing, file serving, multi/single user ???

Gee, you've convinced me. :disgust:

 

[TheDaishi]

jose: Uptime and speed of no importance, data security and capacity are. If, within 5 years time, one of those drives goes bang, being able to get the data back by getting it replaced on warranty is what this is for.

Matt:
GBP600 = USD1142 (and 15 cents)
And the 600 is all in cost, not a penny more for the NAS and drives included.

Right, time to go home.
Personally, I would choose building my own machine with nice reliable RAID5 and being able to run some other nice servers too.
Alex is not so techie as me, so I dunno what he'll do.

Either way, I get to play with expensive toys without having to pay for them.

woohoo!

Ta,

Jim.

 

[TheDaishi]

Oh, it's a fileserver
Just mass storage for a network spread across two houses with 3 or 4 PCs and a PDA.
May spread to 3 or 4 houses one day.

The worst bit is trying to balence traffic across the ADSL lines.

Cheers,

Jim.