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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."
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.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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.
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.