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Chipset Serial ATA RAID Performance Exposed
TheRaindog writes "Serial ATA RAID has become a common check-box feature for new motherboards, but The Tech Report's chipset Serial ATA and RAID comparison reveals that the performance of Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, and VIA's SATA RAID implementations can be anything but common. There are distinct and sometimes alarming performance differences between each chipset's Serial ATA and RAID implementations. It's also interesting to see performance scale from single-drive configurations to multi-disk arrays, which don't offer as much of a performance gain in day-to-day applications as one might expect."
To put "compatable" above "performance" just to save time and a couple of pennies a chipset.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
it's not about pure transfer rate as newbs and even an alarming number of techies, often think...
SiS, nVidia and Via are hardly world renowned for their RAID controllers, so why should we all act surprised that a consumer level product from low-cost manufacturers with very little experience designing these types of device doesn't exactly have screaming fast performance?
I think that the hard drive is the most overlooked upgrade for a "power user". If at all possible, go out and pick up a 15krpm Ultra SCSI hard drive and controller for the boot partition. Use that slow ATA crap for storage of non-performance type stuff.
18 or 36 gig drives aren't exactly too expensive given the performance that they offer.
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1) talk about the benifits of RAID 2) make the general public think thats they really need a RAID regardless of the fact that they generally do not 3) make a chipset cheaply to get people to buy more HD to make a RAID 4)???????? 5) PROFIT Here is my question... what ever happen to just backing things up. Not everyone is a multi-million dollar corp. I highly doubt you would loss everything if that collection of Britney Spears vorbis files went in the crapper.... So why make a RAID?
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In most cases, RAID is slower than single-disk access,
True for write at raid 4/5, not true for read under any raid. If two pieces of data are on different drives, you can get the differfent heads seeking independently. Raid 0, 1, 3 have the seek efficiency of a single drive and the data transfer efficiency of a multiple drive. Dince data processinjg accesses are dominated by seek, 4 and 4, which allow multiple seeks, will beed single drives.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
From what I can see in the market right now,
1. Everyone says they need more storage, so the market for it should be huge
2. SAN or NAS configurations are always more expensive than people think (even though they are radically more cheap than they were two-three years ago).
3. Because of the sticker-shock, a lot of people actually spend their first swipe at the problem cleaning out the cruft and streamlining their business processes and data management rather than drop coinage on storage kit
4. Storage companies are having a very hard time here in Japan, probably from the influx of vendors (see #1 above).
davejenkins.com |
You are a hardware vendor. Would you rather sell a) 10,000 units that are broadly compatible but offer [arbitrary number] 80% performance or b) 3,000 narrowly-focused units that offer 100% performance at a slight price premium?
I believe the revenue generated by selling 10,000 units would outweigh that of the 3,000 higher-priced units, even if the technology in a) is inferior.
I'm not saying this is the best/worst/right/wrong way of looking at the situation; I'm saying this is probably the compromise the vendor has to make when offering such items.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Why should computer hardware be exempt from the "You get what you pay for?" dictum which dominates other markets.
And when you make millions and millions of any one thing, a "couple of pennies a chipset" adds up. Once again, that's what you get when you buy a commodity.
I agree Raptor are great disks, 2 of them will out run PCI bus bandwidth, would you go PCI-X for SATA raid? a good PCI-X RAID card will cost $300+ for 4 ports, no thanks, I will stay my SCSI solution.
The bottom line is SATA don't even have a BUS.
Benchmarking different block sizes is absolutely useless. It's ridiculous that they didn't even do a full test of all the common (16, 32, 64, 128) block sizes. No empirical data is obtained here - no direct comparisons may be made of the tested devices because of the laziness of the reviewer. By leaving the defaults, he's assuming the user has no idea what their own data delivery needs are.
The only users who should even contemplate deploying a RAID array will certainly do the research to come up with the ideal stripe block size, given their usage patterns and requirements.
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I'm not saying this is the best/worst/right/wrong way of looking at the situation
Choosing compatibility over performance probably is the smarter decision when you are dealing with integrated devices. Those who want top performace can add the appropriate PCI/PCI-X/PCIe card.
Also, machines that need top performance often also need low downtime. When that RAID hardware goes bad replacing the card is far easier, and less expensive, than replacing the motherboard.
I'm curious if those of you out there may have some recommendations based on your personal experience?
I've been snooping around for a stand-alone RAID array. Ideally I'd like it to be SCSI-compatible and I can plug it into a SCSI port on a server and it would be relatively OS-independent. RAID 5.
What are the most economical options in this area? Any recommendations for brands/manufacturers? Are there IDE-based RAID 5 drive arrays that have a SCSI interface and are they worth exploring?
Tecnically, the only justification for hot-swap is a zero-downtime requirement. If downtime can be scheduled, then an online spare is all you need and spares are good in any case. The need for hotplug is consistently overstated.
RAID 5 is increasingly marginalized by the low cost of drives and high capacity they offer. RAID 1 *should* increasingly replace RAID 5 in the minds of people who understand the issues but sadly it does not. Many people believe that RAID 5 is simply "four better". Those same people also like hot-swap.
Sure, RAID 10 is even more reliable than RAID 5, but at some point budget comes into play and when you've got other points of failure such as CPU, PSU, memory or fans. I've got to be honest, I've seen a lot more RAID 5 installations then RAID 10. Your experience might be different. But its definitely horses for courses - different situations call for different RAID setups.