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scsi raid controller?

G

groovin

Senior member
replacing an older mylex card. i want an LVD/SE SCSI U320 RAID card 80 pin. Something with all the features you can expect from such a card like:

-hot swap capable
-RAID 0,1,5,10, etc
-error/alert notifications
-nice management gui
-hot spare, automatic array rebuild

and so on. I was thinking about the LSILogic MegaRAID cards, but was wondering if anyone had any experience with others.

OS will be NT/2k/2k3.

Thanks
 
ill be using about 4 U320 15K rpm Seagate drives at 36GB each for RAID5 and have an extra as a hot spare.
 
They don't make 80 pin cards, all the cards are 68pin and you get a backplane or converters for your drives, if you have 80pin drives I'd highly suggest investing in a quality Scsi backplane, it makes organizing your drives and hot swaping much much easier.
 
No actual ill effects from it, you just need to be carefull with them is all, I run 2x80 pin drives daily with no probs.
 
Originally posted by: Arcanedeath
They don't make 80 pin cards, all the cards are 68pin and you get a backplane or converters for your drives, if you have 80pin drives I'd highly suggest investing in a quality Scsi backplane, it makes organizing your drives and hot swaping much much easier.
Click to expand...

exactly..
 
If all your drives are SCA then consider getting hot swap cages for them.

LSi MegaRAID 320-2X and Intel SRCU-42X HBA come to mind here. Both will not disappoint.
 
Originally posted by: Kvaerner Masa
If all your drives are SCA then consider getting hot swap cages for them.

LSi MegaRAID 320-2X and Intel SRCU-42X HBA come to mind here. Both will not disappoint.
Click to expand...

where can you get the cages?
 
thanks for the replies so far guys!

i already have a rackmount with hot swappable bays. I pulled a dead drive out and it was 80 pin so i figured the card was 80 pin... thanks for correcting me. The 320-2X look really nice.
 
The SRCU42X is essentially the same HBA as the 320-2X and has more availability at reasonable prices.

Examples

Some notes about these HBA:

1) PCI-X is REQUIRED. The product will NOT WORK AT ALL in any other slot
2) A BBU is highly recommended (really required) if you want to use write back cache mode which is recommended to boost performance particularly with R5 arrays.

A PCI-E version is available as well that will work in non worksation/server boards but availability is not as good and early on seems to have some compatability problems with some chipsets.
 
i know you touched on it a bit, but if you could elaborate more on what good does a backup battery unit do on a raid card?
 
The battery backup keeps the contents on the (cache) ram refreshed until they can be commited (flushed) back to the array. Some will say a UPS negates this feature and this could not be further from the truth. Accidents still happen. We have lots of these HBA's in service with 512MB - all using WB.

I tried this once with no battery - defragging the root volume and pulling the power plug. System came back up and started booting only to stop with "Error Loading OS". I would not want that to happen on a server!
 
thanks for the info sharkeeper... looking at these two cards, neither seems to support Win NT 4 server anymore... if so, they dont mention it on their site.
 
sharkeeper -
are these any good for something that doesn't need a lot bandwidth but i would like to use 10krpm hdds (for seek times) in a mirroring raid setup? the drives would be u160 or u320 but i am assuming they are backward compatable to u2?
 
sharkeeper -
are these any good for something that doesn't need a lot bandwidth but i would like to use 10krpm hdds (for seek times) in a mirroring raid setup? the drives would be u160 or u320 but i am assuming they are backward compatable to u2?
Click to expand...

Those would be fine for use in a server where availability is more of a concern than performance. If you seek performance you may want to use a more robust solution such as a LSi Elite 1600 which will work in a PCI-32/33 slot and have much better i/o performance.
 
Originally posted by: sharkeeper
sharkeeper -
are these any good for something that doesn't need a lot bandwidth but i would like to use 10krpm hdds (for seek times) in a mirroring raid setup? the drives would be u160 or u320 but i am assuming they are backward compatable to u2?
Click to expand...

Those would be fine for use in a server where availability is more of a concern than performance. If you seek performance you may want to use a more robust solution such as a LSi Elite 1600 which will work in a PCI-32/33 slot and have much better i/o performance.
Click to expand...

thanks for the info, the files are small(50-100K) but there are ~40,000 of them and a mysql db that keeps track of them on a website so thorougput is not of any concern, and i am also limited by a 512 up internet connection.
 
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