[geeks] Serial ATA

[Shawn Wallbridge]

Joshua D Boyd wrote:

>
>I just would like to take a quick moment to say that I paid less for
>92gigs of SCSI harddrive space than the going price on 60gig UltraATA
>drives.  
>
>What do you consider a decent UltraATA controller?  Lots of people call
>the promise controllers decent, but I'm highly unimpressed.  3ware on
>the other hand... If they would get wider OS support, or come out with a
>SCSI model instead of using PCI...
>
>  
>

Well the big problem with most Promise 'RAID' controllers is that they 
are just IDE controllers and the actual RAID is done in the drivers (and 
why the support for them is binary only). Promise does make some actual 
hardware RAID controllers, but they are about the same price as the 
3ware cards.

The 3Ware cards have worked well for us. Huge ass storage for less money 
(2TB server for $10k CAN). We have tried SCSI array's (8-73GB Hitatchi 
10k drives in a Sun 711 connected to an Adaptec 3210S w. 256MB cache) 
and the performance was about the same (except 4 out of 8 of the drives 
died within a week). So we are going back to IDE raid.

3Ware just released a 12 port IDE RAID card which sounds nice. 

As for OS support, it's pretty good. While they only support Linux and 
Windows, their drivers are completely open, so any OS could be supported 
given the interest (and willing and competent programmers). The 
management interface is a Linux binary, but almost everyone has Linux 
binary emulation (ok, well maybe not, but it seems like it). I know the 
cards work in OpenBSD, so I can't see the rest of the BSD's not 
supporting it (or at least for long).

One really nice thing, I just read that you can move from a 6x00 series 
card to a 7x00 series card without having to rebuild the array. To me 
that is a big deal because the 6x00 series are not made anymore and they 
are getting hard to find (and we have 4 that I worry about finding a 
replacement for if they die).

shawn