Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters

Robbedoeske writes "Tweakers.net has put online a comparison of nine Serial ATA RAID 5 adapters. Can the establishment counter the attack of the newcomers? Which of the contestants delivers the best performance, offers the best value for money and has the best featureset?"

Comments

32 pages? No thanks.

[Mr. Sketch]

After 32 pages, it's probably just best to skip to the conclusion:
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/32

Where it has the executive summary:

Areca ARC-1120: highly recommended
RAIDCore BC4852: recommended
HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A: recommended

For several reasons, we will refuse recommendations on the remaing adapters in this comparison

I think that pretty much covers the jist of the article.

Don't plan on mixing Highpoint cards

[GoodNicsTken]

I had a Rocket Raid 100 (IDE 4 drive RAID1/0) and a RocketRaid 1640 (4 Channel SATA RAID 0,1,5) card. With nothing connected to the 1640 and 2 mirrored drives on the RR 100 the disks attached to the RR100 in bios show up on the 1640, and when windows gets to the boot screen it locks up.

When I removed the drives in windows, it booted up without problems. Highpoint has sent me diag tools to run rather than building this in their lab!

I'm not too impressed with them so far.

Re:Drivers?

[LWATCDR]

3-ware has very good support for linux

Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed.

[arivanov]

Well... as someone who has both of reviewed 3ware adapters in production I am not amazed. They are nice, but nothing to shout about. They also have LOADS of PROBLEMS not mentioned in the article.

• 8506 SATA series prior to a certain board revision are extremely susceptible to bus noise. As a result you have to find a way to bastardize the PCI bus down to 33MHz and provide additional grounding. Even so, they are likely to cause random system deaths and serious memory corruption in most Opteron MSI and Assus motherboards as well as some other designs. Using in 1U and 2U chassis with riser cards is a no-no for the same reason (exemption for some buffered risers). As a side note, most resellers will try to stuff you with an old board despite the fact that they know about this problem.
• 9506 board and linux driver at least as of 2.6.9 defaults to no read cache, only write cache which is outright daft. It is also the major reason for low performance at least under Linux.

Both are nice cards, but I would not recommend them to anyone who does not have extensive PC hardware knowledge. They are fussy, carpicious and very hard to troubleshoot when they go wrong.

My thoughts

[tonsofpcs]

Areca ARC-1120 looks better on each and every page except for the sequential read/write tests where it tends to come in third [I'm just reading off the graphs].
The RAIDCore BC4852 seems fastest for sequential reads/writes.

BOTH of these have linux support. The Areca supports: Mandrake (9.0),Red Hat (7.3, 8.0, 9.0, AS 3.0), Fedora Core (2, 2 AMD64), SuSE (7.3, 9.1 Pro, 9.0 SLES, 9.0 SLES AMD64)
The RAIDCore: Red Hat (9.0, AS 3.0), Fedora Core (1)
The Areca also supports Windows XP and Server 2003 64-bit versions and BSDs: 4.2R, 4.4R, 5.2.1 (incl. source).

Also, the Areca ARC-1160 (they finished testing after the original article was written, so it didn't make it into most of the text) appears at the top of all of the Index/performance tests, except for "Fileserver - Large Filesize - RAID 1/10" and "My SQL - Data Drive - RAID 1/10".

Re:Related Question

[beavis88]

From what I've heard, you should assume that you won't be able to swap cards out. You might be able to if you stick with the same manufacturer and they're using the same chipsets, but again, don't count on it.

Re:Eight or Nine?

[Phantom69]

From Page 2 of TFA:

Note: Since the original Dutch article was published in late January, we have finished tests of the 16-port Areca ARC-1160 using 128MB, 512MB and 1GB cache configurations and RAID 5 arrays of up to 12 drives. The ARC-1160 was using the latest 1.35 beta firmware. Furthermore, a non-disclosure agreement on the LSI MegaRAID SCSI 320-2E PCI Express x8 SCSI RAID adapter was lifted. The performance graphs have been updated to include the Areca ARC-1160 and LSI MegaRAID SCSI 320-2E results. Discussions of the results have not been updated, however. The results should be self-explanatory.

SCSI vs SATA

[sjbe]

SCSI, in its current form, is just opening itself up to becoming antiquated.

Perhaps, though personally I've had far more trouble getting SATA (and IDE) drives to work than SCSI drives and I've used both extensively. Driver issues mostly. SCSI's performance is better in multi-user systems, it's easy to set up, drivers tend to be less problematic especially on systems other than Windows, and it can have more devices attached. People claim it's more reliable though I have no evidence of this, and frankly am a bit dubious of the claim. SATA is also easy to set up and is a lot cheaper, though the drivers are still less ubiquitous than with SCSI and performance doesn't match SCSI yet for multi-user systems. (on a single user system it doesn't matter much)

That said, the next generation of SCSI is Serial Attached SCSI which is compatible with SATA. A SAS controller will be able to use SATA drives if you don't need the extra features of SAS. SCSI isn't going away, it's just adapting.

Re:SCSI vs SATA

[gmezero]

Here's how I seperate SCSI vs SATA. I use SATA RAID setups for video workstations that need large drive space and cheap drives... and I don't care if the drive pops after a year of abuse.

I put SCSI in my servers (RAID or otherwise) when I want the box to run for years and years under heavy load and not have to worry about replacing drives regularly.

With SCSI, your paying for the quality control/quality assurance more than anything else.

From what I understand a good SATA drive has the same TTL quality as a good IDE drive, just faster performance.

Re:Drivers?

[ajrs]

read the rest of the article. The fine article says which ones have drivers for different versions of MS, prebuilt drivers for linux, Bsd (which must not be dead), Mac, and if the source code is available.

Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed.

[archen]

Just as an aside and sticking up for 3ware. 3ware is one of the few companies that has good driver support for Linux and FreeBSD. As far as 2port SATA mirroring I always recommend 3ware as my first choice - performance is good enough.

Obviously if you're looking at a raid 5 solution, you're moving more towards higher end stuff, so it would be hard to recommend anything that performs poorly there. Rather dissapointing, but probably not that surprising since their SATA cards seem very similar to the ATA cards, so I'm sure they're throwing performance out the window there somewhere =/

waste of time and money.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am running RAID 5 in my computer right now.

Linux software RAID. Makes all this crap obsolete except for some specific cases.

I can have as many drives as I want, I can have hot swapability, I can have hot spares and all sorts of fun stuff.

Add LVM on top of that and you have a solution that is much superior then going out and buying any raid controller, except for the most fastest.

Linux software raid is actually VERY nice, I don't know of any OS that has better setup.

Re:Eight or Nine?

[FemmeT]

There are really nine adapters: 3ware Escalade 8506-8, 3ware Escalade 9500S-8, Areca ARC-1120, Areca ARC-1160, HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A, LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4, LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-6, Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 and RAIDCore BC4852.

The results of the LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4 and MegaRAID SATA 150-6 have been combined in the graphs since there is basicly no performance difference between to two in configurations up to four drives.

Re:Why would RAID require drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the RAID array requires drivers or if I need a special Kernel driver, doesn't that mean that the device is at least partially software-based, which then means that some processes may actually be handled by the CPU, thereby reducing performance.

You're confusing 2 things. These adapters are raid cards, and they are disk controllers.

You need a driver to talk to a disk controller, even a plain regular one. Linux and BSD drivers are hard to find for some disk controllers.

You are thinking of some scsi raid enclosures where the enclosure manages the raid, and as far as the computer is concerned, the computer sees one scsi disk, without knowing any details behind the scenes. The computer only needs a regular scsi card. This raid enclosure can be easily used with many operating systems, since the operating system only needs to know how to talk to a scsi disk, and most do.

my 2 cents

[Ankou]

We have used 3 LSI 150-6 MegaRaid Cards and I must say that its the most increadible card / bang for buck you can get. Works perfectly in linux (Slackware 10.0 - 10.1 in our case), uses either the megaraid or megaraid2 (for those that want verbose information) right from the stock kernel compile. In each server we put in 6 Seagate SATA drives 250 GB each, totalling an impressive 1.2 TB total space. For under a grand (card + 6x 250 GB drives) you cant get a cheaper more reliable alternative. The thing aint slow either, consitantly get access of 100 mbps transfer speeds or more (hdparm tests / benchmarks). Initialization is almost instantanious, and while its doing the background inits (after the initial quick init), you can already access the entire contents of the full raided container. Do yourself a favor and grab one of these cards, you'll wonder why you stuck with the almost 3x price of scsi. Newegg.com has em for I think 290 bucks for the 150-6. Pay the extra money for the 150-6 its worth it. Optional battery packs available as well for the card.

The Article Never Explains What RAID 5 Is

[windowpain]

Now you could argue that a car review in Car and Driver doesn't bother explaining what a transmission does but RAID is several orders for magnitude more complex and esoteric.

There are so many different flavors of RAID it can be hard to keep them straight if you're not working with them every day.

Anyway there are good explanations of RAID here and here.

Re:Beware hardware RAID

[justins]

If the RAID card goes, unless you replace it with an identical make and model, you can kiss your data goodbye.

If you are dumb enough to use RAID as a substitute for backing up, that is.

Re:Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed.

[RFC959]

I am going to chime in with my damnation of 3ware's cards too. We have about 20 8500s and 8506s, with either Maxtor or Seagate drives. The things are horribly unreliable. Almost every day at least one array needs to be rebuilt. On a few occasions, we've even seen the controllers spontaneously lose an entire array - just poof, not accessible anymore and not visible through the administrative tools. Reboot and there's the array again.

Most of our support has been through a VAR (who sucks too, but that's a separate rant), but when we talked to 3ware and told them how we were using the arrays (for database storage), they immediately went, "Ooh...uhh...that's...not really a good idea..." Even they admitted that the SATA arrays are really for very light-duty use only. (I blame our old VP of technology, who always wanted to go the cheap route on everything.)

Oh, and if you want to upgrade the controller's firmware? 3ware tells you to boot off a DOS-formatted floppy. This is not enterprise-level stuff.

Not hardware RAID

[jgarzik]

Note that several of the cards reviewed in this review are not hardware RAID. SATA RAID is famous for being non-RAID controller + RAID software driver.

See my SATA RAID FAQ for a listing of the most common SATA chipsets which are sold as RAID, but are really software RAID (a.k.a. "fake RAID").

I'm also rather amazed that this wasn't mentioned in the review, but I admit I did not read all the of the 32 pages.