Re: Advice on Controller card for SAS disks

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Tomas Vondra <tv(at)fuzzy(dot)cz> wrote:
> On 7 Březen 2012, 18:49, See Sing Lau wrote:
>>
>> We are looking for advice on the RAID controller cards with battery back
>> cache for 10K SAS disks with RAID 10.  Any suggestion for the best card
>> and settings to use for heavy write transactions.
>
> It's hard to give you advices when we know nothing about your environment
> (e.g. what OS) and other requirements (how many drives, what does 'heavy
> write transactions' means etc.).
>
> I'd personally vote for LSI/3Ware, Areca or HighPoint controllers.

Never used highpoint contollers for RAID, just for simple HBAs in home
machines. The LSI/3Ware and Arecas are pretty much the best battery
backed caching controllers. Apparently Adaptec and HP have done some
catching up in the last few years.

I prefer the 16xx and 18xx series Arecas because they have their own
network interfaces and can send alerts separate from outside
monitoring, and you can configure them remotely via web interface. On
linux boxes this is a big step up from the horrific megacli command
line util on LSIs. The GUI interface on the LSIs are pretty crappy
too. 3Wares use the tw_cli utility which is easy to use and self
documenting.