RAID SATA controller card recommendation?
Hello, I am looking to get a RAID card to put my SATA HDDs in a mirror. Has to be hardware RAID for that particular machine which is quite old. Can anyone please recommend a reliable one, $250 or less? Thanks! -- -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com
I have had good luck with using the linux built in raid. For raid-1 the mdadm tools should be just as fast as any raid card that you can get on a budget. Raid-3 and above do better with the caching on higher end raid cards but then your likely out of the $250 range. The important thing it to monitor the raid status. If a drive fails and your not checking the status you will only find out about the first drive failure when the second one fails and your filesystem is unrecoverable. I have seen this happen with raid-cards and also with software raid. On 2022-12-01 14:00, Aurelian Melinte via talk wrote:
Hello,
I am looking to get a RAID card to put my SATA HDDs in a mirror. Has to be hardware RAID for that particular machine which is quite old. Can anyone please recommend a reliable one, $250 or less?
Thanks!
--
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-- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||
On Thu, Dec 01, 2022 at 02:00:24PM -0500, Aurelian Melinte via talk wrote:
I am looking to get a RAID card to put my SATA HDDs in a mirror. Has to be hardware RAID for that particular machine which is quite old. Can anyone please recommend a reliable one, $250 or less?
How many disks? Personally my main server box in the house runs software raid6 with nine drives, and then for the root disk I have a pair of SSDs running on a hardware raid controller. It's a peculiar extremely cheap one: 0b:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9128 PCIe SATA 6 Gb/s RAID controller with HyperDuo (rev 11) Has a menu for setting up the raid at boot, then after that it's just an AHCI disk as far as linux is concerned. There does exist software to monitor it for linux, although it is ancient and was meant for redhat 6. I did manage to get it to run once just to see, but I generally haven't bothered with it. It supposedly even supports port multipliers, but I haven't tried that. The idea of running 8 drives of 2 sata ports with a x1 PCIe connection seems like a bandwidth problem to me, and too many points of failure that could take out the raid. They do seem to be hard to find these days though but if you can, it's about $50. -- Len Sorensen
On 06/12/2022 19:53, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Thu, Dec 01, 2022 at 02:00:24PM -0500, Aurelian Melinte via talk wrote:
I am looking to get a RAID card to put my SATA HDDs in a mirror. Has to be hardware RAID for that particular machine which is quite old. Can anyone please recommend a reliable one, $250 or less? How many disks?
Personally my main server box in the house runs software raid6 with nine drives, and then for the root disk I have a pair of SSDs running on a hardware raid controller. It's a peculiar extremely cheap one:
0b:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9128 PCIe SATA 6 Gb/s RAID controller with HyperDuo (rev 11)
Thanks all! To follow-up: that would be a simple two drives in a mirror setup. So, I had to settle with an LSI 9212-4i. A bit of a pain - had to flash new firmware and I cannot get to the BIOS at boot time so I had to fish for the storcli command line tool. But so far so good. At this point I would think mdadm would be a superior solution -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com
Now that you found a solution, I have question... Why hardware card? I assume it's Linux. And, I found software raid (mdadm or btrfs) good enough for mirror setup. On 2022-12-11 14:34, Aurelian Melinte via talk wrote:
On 06/12/2022 19:53, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Thu, Dec 01, 2022 at 02:00:24PM -0500, Aurelian Melinte via talk wrote:
I am looking to get a RAID card to put my SATA HDDs in a mirror. Has to be hardware RAID for that particular machine which is quite old. Can anyone please recommend a reliable one, $250 or less? How many disks?
Personally my main server box in the house runs software raid6 with nine drives, and then for the root disk I have a pair of SSDs running on a hardware raid controller. It's a peculiar extremely cheap one:
0b:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9128 PCIe SATA 6 Gb/s RAID controller with HyperDuo (rev 11)
Thanks all!
To follow-up: that would be a simple two drives in a mirror setup. So, I had to settle with an LSI 9212-4i. A bit of a pain - had to flash new firmware and I cannot get to the BIOS at boot time so I had to fish for the storcli command line tool. But so far so good. At this point I would think mdadm would be a superior solution
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On 2022-12-11 15:45, William Park via talk wrote:
Now that you found a solution, I have question...
Why hardware card? I assume it's Linux. And, I found software raid (mdadm or btrfs) good enough for mirror setup.
A raid card can offload some of the overhead that the OS would have to deal with in terms of co-ordination of multiple writes. In the case of raid-1 the extra overhead of multiple writes should be minimal but for raid-4 and above there are a number of data manipulations that need to be preformed and these will burn up CPU cycles. Raid cards often include a battery backed up cache which can significantly improve disk performance. The cache also helps with an issue called "write-hole" which can happen in raid-4,5,6 ( For those with trouble sleeping I suggest https://lwn.net/Articles/665299/ ). Otherwise I do not believe that raid cards have any features that are unavailable in Linux using the md tools. Once again if your running raid of any type make sure you have an automated check that will test the array health and send out a warning if there is a problem. -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||
On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 09:45:57PM -0500, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
A raid card can offload some of the overhead that the OS would have to deal with in terms of co-ordination of multiple writes. In the case of raid-1 the extra overhead of multiple writes should be minimal but for raid-4 and above there are a number of data manipulations that need to be preformed and these will burn up CPU cycles.
Raid cards often include a battery backed up cache which can significantly improve disk performance. The cache also helps with an issue called "write-hole" which can happen in raid-4,5,6 ( For those with trouble sleeping I suggest https://lwn.net/Articles/665299/ ).
Otherwise I do not believe that raid cards have any features that are unavailable in Linux using the md tools.
Once again if your running raid of any type make sure you have an automated check that will test the array health and send out a warning if there is a problem.
Not sure what the performance is like these days but I certainly remember putting raid cards in IBM servers 15 or 20 years ago, and the performance dropped to 1/3 of what linux could do with software. Sure the cpu load dropped a little bit but it wasn't using that much in the first place. That's before considereing the firmware bugs in the raid controller that allowed you to create volumes over 2TB each, but refused to allow resizing or changing of them afterwards if you did. Software raid is way more flexible, faster, and much easier to change and move to a new machine later. And cheaper too. -- Len Sorensen
On 11/12/2022 15:45, William Park via talk wrote:
Now that you found a solution, I have question...
Why hardware card? I assume it's Linux. And, I found software raid (mdadm or btrfs) good enough for mirror setup.
The machine is an old Dell Optiplex 755. I can see sometimes the CPU in pain so I hesitated to load it. The MB has only fakeraid support, not something I wanted to use either. -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com
participants (4)
-
Alvin Starr -
Aurelian Melinte -
Lennart Sorensen -
William Park