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RAID Controller Shoot-Out

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the millions-of-bugs-scream-at-once dept.

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a comparison with benchmarks of three RAID controllers from Adaptec, LSI Logic, and Promise, and along the way gives you a little refresher course on RAID in general and why you want to use it: faster throughput, longer uptime, and improved data security. Motherboard RAID controllers do well when there's 'very little or no load on the CPU, I/O bus, and memory bandwidth. But with heavy traffic and processor loads, the limitations of the shared bus and the benefits of intelligent RAID's integrated IOP and memory cache have a more significant impact.'"

4 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RAID0 is evil and must die. by i_am_not_a_script_03 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sometimes all you care about is the maximum performance you can get out of a disk subsystem. You might not care about data loss because you've some other means of taking care of it (backups, replication, network raid etc.), or the data is dispensable. An example is a cluster of high performance database servers, with replication taking care of the data redundancy and a raid 0 disk subsystems because thats the best raw performance you can get.

  2. How did they work under? by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Linux, BSD, or Solaris?
    How about calling it the Windows RAID controller shoot out?
    ExtremeTech should just change it's name to Mainstream tech and get it over with.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  3. *nix RAID Support by pilot1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to the OpenBSD i386 supported hardware website, out of the cards reviewed, only Adaptec and LSI cards are compatible with OpenBSD.
    However, Adaptec has refused to provide documentation so that the OpenBSD project may improve the drivers.
    "Note: In the past year Adaptec has lied to us repeatedly about forthcoming documentation so that RAID support for these (rather buggy) raid controllers could be stabilized, improved, and managed. As a result, we do not recommend the Adaptec cards for use."
    Other *nix variants might support the Adaptec and Promise cards a little more, but the hardware fully supported by OpenBSD is generally well-supported across all *nix variants.
    Out of the cards reviewed, only the one from LSI is worth buying. Adaptec may have a little support, but it's not a good idea to purchase any RAID cards from them until they start providing better documentation.

  4. Re:RAID0 is evil and must die. by Minwee · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Hey, let's double our chances of data loss by distributing data over TWO drives instead of one.

    Dumbass."

    Thank you for your comment, Dumbass, but around here you don't need to sign your name to each comment. The system does that for you automatically.