On 05/23/2011 07:14 AM, Ed W wrote:
Getting back on track of specific adaptor advice:
To recap: I am looking for ideas on what to buy to upgrade our small
office servers (not really stretched, just adding more backup disks and
similar). My main requirement is to be able to buy equipment in single
lots (one server at a time) and so I require the ability to take an
array from one machine and use it in another machine using a different
adaptor - therefore the previous thread has dissuaded me from looking at
adaptors with writeback cache (and also hardware raid controllers)
Therefore can I see a show of hands for "good value" HBA adaptors with
8, 12 and 24 ports? Ideally using fewer PCI slots is preferred and
onboard expanders rather than separate expanders are preferred
Be aware that this won't be cheap. Also be aware that many (most)
expandor designs are performance limited due to their implementations.
We see significant contention from bandwidth oversubscription in every
day situations, regardless where the expandor is.
On the HBA side
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/internal/sas9201-16i/index.html
On the hardware RAID side of this:
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/internal_raid/megaraid_sas/value_line/megaraid_sas_9260-16i/index.html
LSI controllers as HBAs are reasonably good. Make sure you update your
drivers and firmware to late revisions.
Seems that previously we discovered that most LSI RAID cards were well
supported and Marvel cards were frequently not. Does this
generalisation persist with pure HBA cards also?
I can see the list of LSI HBA cards on their site, but any pointers for
good value HBA adaptors appreciated? (Current chassis will be a tower
chassic, but future upgrades are expected to be Supermicro/Norco 3/4U
rack boxes)
(is there a page on the wiki already covering any of this that we could
try and distil this wisdom to?)
Don't skimp on power supply, or power distribution. RAIDs hate that.
Don't skimp on cooling. Drives hate that.
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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Scalable Informatics, Inc.
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