Re: hardware raid suggestions

Not sure what your hw platform is, but I always used to get fantastic
performance from Compaq Smart Array battery backed cards. Note that I
haven't bought any recently so HP may have "hp invent"-ed them...

But whatever the brand - if you get a swag of battery backed cache you
won't know yourself. It's fun to install an OS on them as well - watch
the drive format and verify take 10 seconds ;)

Another option to look at is outboard raid boxes that present a single
drive "interface" to the server - I know people who swear by them.
--
Mark Aufflick
e mark(at)pumptheory(dot)com
w www.pumptheory.com (work)
w mark.aufflick.com (personal)
p +61 438 700 647
On 16/07/2004, at 4:07 AM, Brian Hirt wrote:

> I've been using the adaptec ZCR raid cards in our servers for a while
> now, mostly small systems with 3 or 6 disks, and we've been very happy
> with them. However, we're building a new DB machine with 14 U320 15K
> SCA drives, and we've run into a performance bottlenkeck with the ZCR
> card where it just won't scale well. Without going into too many
> details, we've tested RAID5, RAID10 and RAID50 on pretty much every
> array size from 4-14 disks (raid 50 tests used more drives), using
> JFS, reiserfs and EXT3. With every different configuration,
> performance didn't improve after array size became greater than 6
> disks.. We used various benchmarks, including pgbench with scale
> factors of 10, 100, 1000, 5000 and clients of 10, 15, 30 and 45.
> We've done many other tests and monitoring tools, and we've come to
> the conclusion that the ZCR is the problem.
>
> We're looking into getting an Adaptec 2200S or the Megaraid 320 2x
> which have better processors, and hopefully better performance. We
> feel that the use of the AIC7930 as the CPU on the ZCR just doesn't
> cut it and a faster raid controller would work better. Does anyone out
> there have any experience with these cards with postgresql and linux?
> If so, would you be willing to share your experiences and possibly
> give a recommendation?
>
> --brian
>
>
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