Re: SATA drives performance

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Jeremy Harris wrote:
On 12/24/2009 05:12 PM, Richard Neill wrote:
Of course, with a server machine, it's nearly impossible to use mdadm
raid: you are usually compelled to use a hardware raid card.

Could you expand on that?

Both of the last machines I bought (an IBM X3550 and an HP DL380) come with hardware raid solutions. These are an utter nuisance because:

  - they can only be configured from the BIOS (or with a
    bootable utility CD). Linux has very basic monitoring tools,
    but no way to reconfigure the array, or add disks to empty
    hot-swap slots while the system is running.

  - If there is a Linux raid config program, it's not part of the
    main packaged distro, but usually a pre-built binary, available
    for only one release/kernel of the wrong distro.

  - the IBM one had dodgy firmware, which, until updated, caused the
    disk to totally fail after a few days.

  - you pay a lot of money for something effectively pointless, and
    have less control and less flexibility.

After my experience with the X3550, I hunted for any server that would ship without hardware raid, i.e. connect the 8 SATA hotswap slots direct to the motherboard, or where the hardware raid could be de-activated completely, and put into pass-through mode. Neither HP nor IBM make such a thing.

Richard





- Jeremy


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