IDE RAID Examined

Bender writes "The Tech Report has an interesting article comparing IDE RAID controllers from four of the top manufacturers. The article serves as more than just a straight product comparison, because the author has included tests for different RAID levels and different numbers of drives, plus a comprehensive series of benchmarks intended to isolate the performance quirks of each RAID controller card at each RAID level. The results raise questions about whether IDE RAID can really take the place of a more expensive SCSI storage subsystem in workstation or small-scale server environments. Worthwhile reading for the curious sysadmin." I personally would love to hear any ide-raid stories that slashdotters might have.

Comments

IDE AID?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell me the hard drive manufacturers are in that much trouble. I hope Willie Nelson will be there.

at the company I work for

[npietraniec]

At the company I work for, IDE RAID has become somewhat standard because we're basically cheap... At least it's standard on the servers that are fast enough to support it. The rest use dd to copy partitions between backup drives. My boss calls it "RAID point five" We lovingly refer to it as the ghetto network.

A little story

[bravehamster]

I work for a small custom computer shop. We built a system a few months back for a video editing company here in town. Obviously they needed a lot of storage, so we suggested a RAID-5 system using 6 100GB drives, giving them roughly half a terabyte of storage. The liked the idea, but insisted we used RAID-0 (the Purchasing Officer had read his PC Gamer and thought it sounded cool). We advised against it, but they insisted. 2 months down the line, a hard drive on one of their other computers breaks down. Their newly hired technician (the office managers son) saw that their big old file server had 5 hard drives in it, but was only using 1 in windows! Being the smart boy that he is, he dutifully shuts down the machine, removes one of the drives, puts it on the broken machine, formats and loads windows on it. He seemed awfully surprised when the file server wouldn't boot, and tried to blame it on us for losing a month of work. Despite our other recommendations, they had no backups. They went out of business last month.

Re:A little story

[bravehamster]

Apparently he picked one at random. I never really asked.

Re:A little story

[Anonymous Coward]

<tears>
You had me at "office managers son" :)
</tears>

Re:A little story

[archen]

Sort of reminds me of the place I work.

A week after I was hired the computer with the sales database died. I'm the computer guy, so I'm supposed to fix it. I was a bit surprised at what I found (keep in mind this information is supposed to be fairly important information to the company).

The computer had around 256 megs of ram. Was a database server (for sales info) that around 3-4 people were connected to at any given time. Was running WINDOWS 98 using striped IDE hard drives. Among other things that this machine was used for at any given time was graphic editing in Corel Draw (wonderfully stable too I might add), and crash prone MS Office... as well as every God awful freeware screen saver ever found, and many other useless stuff that most people didn't even know what they were supposed to do. Apparently the machine crashed at least 3 times a day, and no one thought there was anything wrong with this.

So one drive dies, and surprise the backup is done on a jazz drive that never worked right. Apparently the girl who used the computer never really read that error message regarding the Jazz drive every morning when she came in. So we had a wonderfully redundant backup with a different Jazz disk for each day of the week with nothing but garbage on all of them.

When I actually put all the pieces of the puzzle together, I just started laughing at how ridiculous the setup was.

Re:A little story

[Afrosheen]

This is where a little sound clip from the Simpsons cartoon comes in handy.

Find any two-second clip of Nelson saying "Ha Ha!" and email it to fools that destroy things after neglecting your advice. It'd be even better to find a little flash clip of Nelson pointing and laughing, it'd add insult to injury.

You asked for it...

[tmark]

I personally would love to hear any ide-raid stories that slashdotters might have.

Once upon a time, in an array far, far away, there lived a young princess who was worried about the integrity of her data...

Re:You asked for it...

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

backing up to several would be.
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Droids. :p

Re:You asked for it...

[Mitchell Mebane]

Once upon a time, in an array far, far away, there lived a young princess who was worried about the integrity of her data...

She knew that elephants never forget, but they do tend to die after a while, so she hired a consultant to investigate multi-elephant solutions. He came up with RASP - Redundant Array of Short-lived Pachyderms. While SCSI (Smart Chimps Storing Information) is more reliable, elephants were a good solution for more people, because they could also be used for plowing fields.

Great article

[lakeland]

This article is much more an introduction to RAID than a point by point comparison of the various drives. Certainly, I wouldn't want to use it for choosing between them when I couldn't afford a mistake. But if you're used to using one or two disks and want increased performance or reliability (and lets face it, who doesn't?) then this article is well worth a read.

My favourite quote from the article : As an added bonus, the lights sometimes flash in a side-to-side in a pattern reminiscent of Knight Rider's KITT.

Re:Great article

[Afrosheen]

If so, then it is a real nice feature, since the DPT "KITT scanner" can morse all kinds of error messages.

Like what? "Michael, there are 2 enemies with guns in that room. Please be careful."

Annoying

[cheezedawg]

You would think that after 130 graphs comparing the controllers he could come up with a stronger conclusion than "I cant really decide which one is the best"

Re:SCSI for workstations?

[Stonent1]

I dunno, post a story on Slashdot with a URL linking to your computer maybe?

Oh, come on...

[NBrooke271]

Everyone say it with me: there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.

Re:IDE Raid, inexpensive but major hassle

[funkdancer]

Before we know it we'll have SATAN in our offices then ... Serial ATA Networks.

(Sorry couldn't resist)

Ouch

[Bert Peers]

This is when you realize how scary it is that i and o are right next to eachother on the keyboard =)

Re:SCSI for workstations?

[Codifex Maximus]

>In the old days we'd blame that failure mode on
>stiction, and could usually get the drive to come
>back one last time (long enough to make a backup)
>by giving the server a good solid thump in just the
>right spot.

Heh, funny you mention that. At one of my former jobs, we had a very old machine running OS/2 with SCSI drives. This machine was the database bridge between the mainframe and many PC based applications. Anyway, when the machine had to be rebooted/powered down (once in a blue speckled moon) they'd have to pick the machine up and drop it just to get the drives spinning. I kid you not! But it ran forever.

Re:IDE Raid, inexpensive but major hassle

[Charm]

24-hour fsck

And that is why fsck is used as a swear word.