Recommend Scsi Raid Card

[Rickten]

Anyone using a scsi raid setup could you recommend what I should look for in a card. I want Ultra160 and LVD support. Anybody have any kind of benchmarks to give. Like sustained transfer rates. I wondering what kind of sustained transfer rates I can get with this kind of setup. I see that most cards have the !960 chip running at 100mhz but I know that mylex has a card using a chip that runs at 233mhz. What does this difference mean in terms of performance? Recommendations.

Also I read something about not all raid cards are bootable. What does this mean or is that bogus info.

Lastly could I run lets say a scsi CDRW on a raid card or would I need a seperate Scsi card for that?

 

[Windogg]

I just put together a server with the Mylex 352. This card is fully bootable and really kick some ass. It has 2 U160 Channels, 100Mhz Intel i960, and 64bit PCI. I dumped the 32MB DIMM and dropped a 64MB DIMM onto the card. Right now my biggest bottleneck is the network. Even with 2 10/100 NICs the controller hardly breaks a sweat. Most of the time it sits waiting for more data to come through the pipe.

I've never thought about running a SCSI device like a CDRW off the card but basic SCSI cards are cheap so get a seperate card for your other devices.

What will be your server used for? What RAID level?

I got mine at Hyper Microsystems. Check them out for some great SCSI products.

Windogg

 

[dkozloski]

There is a lot of SCSI RAID stuff out in the used/refurbished/pulls market for great prices. It is worth your time to look around.

 

[neuralfx]

check out the reviews over at http://www.storagereview.com ....
-neural

 

[Ben]

I agree, Storage Review is a good place to get information.

A word of warning though. Typically SCSI RAID controllers don't do well under sustained transfer rate benchmarks. If your looking for that in particular, your actually better off with IDE RAID.

SCSI RAID cards are geared more towards I/O's per second and low CPU utilization. The SCSI RAID cards do well under these situations.

I'm partial to Mylex controllers myself. I've used a bunch and I've never had a problem, they just work. However, if your looking for all out performance, check the reviews. The Mylex aren't necessarily the fastest cards for a given price range.

As you can imagine, the speed of the chip on the controller has a lot to do with the performance you'll get. A controller with a 233MHz chip will be faster than one with a 100MHz chip. I have a Mylex ExtremeRAID 1100 in my machine and I love it. The only thing I'd trade it for is an ExtremeRAID 2000. My machine has a snappy feel to it that I have yet to experience on any other box. You're talking a lot of money for one of those though.

I've heard that ATTO makes a very fast controller if your going with RAID 0, though I've never used one myself.

Most SCSI RAID controllers don't like running things like CD-ROM's. My Mylex card will recognize a CD-ROM but Mylex doesn't recommend such a configuration. If I were you I'd get a small SCSI card for your CD-ROM's. They are relatively cheap. If you don't need to boot from your CD-ROM then you don't need a SCSI card with a BIOS chip, which will make the card even cheaper. I think Tekram has a basic SCSI card for scanners and CD-ROM's with no BIOS for like $40.

I ran Winbench99 for ya real quick with my 3 39204LW Cheetah's.
Business Disk Winmark: 16,500
High End Disk Winmark: 40,500
Disk Transfer Rate
>Beginning: 93,300
>End: 73,600
Disk Access Time: 8.34
CPU Utilization: .599

If you look at the graph you can see that during the first part of the test the controller is limiting the transfer rate to about 93MB/s. Towards the end of the test as the disk drives move toward the center of the platter they become the bottleneck, as shown by the transfer rates dropping.