Re: advice on raid controller

As others have mentioned, you really ought to get battery-backed cache if
you're doing any volume of writes. The ability to do safe write-back
caching makes an *insane* difference to write performance.

The site you link to also has that for only 15% more money:
http://uk.azzurri.com/product/product.cgi?productId=80

No experience with the card(s) I'm afraid.

In general though, U320 will only be faster than U160 for large sequential
reads, or when you have silly numbers of disks on a channel (i.e. more than
4/channel). If you have silly numbers of disks, then RAID5 will probably be
better, if you have 4 disks total then RAID1+0 will probably be better. In
between it depends on all sorts of other factors. Bear in mind though that
if you *do* have silly numbers of disks then more channels and more cache
will count for more than anything else, so spend the money on that rather
than latest-and-greatest performance for a single channel.

HTH

Matt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> [mailto:pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org]On Behalf Of Richard
> Jones
> Sent: 27 September 2003 18:25
> To: pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: [PERFORM] advice on raid controller
>
>
> Hi, i'm on the verge of buying a "MegaRAID SCSI 320-2" raid controller.
> I need it to build a db server using 4x ultra320 scsi disks
> i'm thinking raid 1+0 but will try with raid5 too and compare
>
> Does anyone have any experience with this model, good or bad i'd like to
> know.. thanks :)
>
> as seen:
> http://uk.azzurri.com/product/product.cgi?productId=188
>
> Regards,
> Richard.
>
> PS: whoever mentioned starting a site with raid controller
> reviews, excellent
> idea - its hard to find decent info on which card to buy.
>
>
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