Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade (RAID)

On 6 May 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 17:22, scott.marlowe wrote:
> > On 5 May 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, 2003-05-05 at 11:31, scott.marlowe wrote:
> > > > On 3 May 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 13:53, Chad Thompson wrote:
> [snip]
> > > What controller do you use for IDE hot-swapping and auto-rebuild?
> > > 3Ware?
> >
> > Linux, and I don't do hot swapping with IDE, just hot rebuild from a
> > spare drive. My servers are running SCSI, by the way, only the
> > workstations are running IDE. With the saved cost of a decent RAID
> > controller (good SCSI controllers are still well over $500 most the time)
> > I can afford enough hot spares to never have to worry about changing one
> > out during the day.
>
> Ah, I guess that drives go out infrequently enough that shutting
> it down at night for a swap-out isn't all that onerous...
>
> What controller model do you use?

My preference is SymBIOS (LSI now) plain UW SCSI 160, but at work we use
adaptec built in UW SCSI 160 on INTEL dual CPU motherboards. I've used
RAID controllers in the past, but now I genuinely prefer linux's built in
kernel level raid to most controllers, and the load on the server is <2%
of one of the two CPUs, so it doesn't really slow anything else down. The
performance is quite good, I can read raw at about 48 Megs a second from a
pair of 10kRPM UWSCSI drives in a RAID1. These drives, individually can
pump out about 25 megs a second individually.