On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Matthew Wakeling wrote:
> I'd be interested in recommendations for RAID cards for small SATA systems.
> It's not anything to do with Postgres - I'm just intending to set up a little
> four-drive array for my home computer, with cheap 1TB SATA drives.
Then why are you thinking of RAID cards? On a Linux only host, you might
as well just get a standard cheap multi-port SATA card that's compatible
with the OS, plug the four drives in, and run software RAID. Anything
else you put in the middle is going to add complications in terms of
things like getting SMART error data from the drives, and the SW RAID will
probably be faster too.
A great source for checking Linux compatibility is
http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html
The only reason I have a good controller card in my system at home is
because it lets me do realistic performance tests with a write cache, so
fsync is accelerated when working with PostgreSQL. If just putting a
bunch of drives in there was my only concern, I'd have just bought a cheap
Silicon Image 3124 PCI-Express board.
> What PCI-Express or motherboard built-in SATA RAID controllers for about four
> drives are there out there that are good, and well supported by Linux? What
> level of support is there for monitoring and reporting of RAID status?
3ware 9650SE-4LPML is what I'd buy today if I wanted hardware SATA RAID.
When I made a similar decision some time ago, I bought an Areca 1210
instead, but two things have changed since then. One, I've become
increasingly unsatisfied with the limitations of the closed-source
controller management tool Areca supplies. And the performance of 3ware's
earlier 9550 model really lagged relative to Areca, while the newer 9650
is quite competative. More details on all of that on the blog entry I
wrote after my last disk failure:
http://notemagnet.blogspot.com/2008/08/linux-disk-failures-areca-is-not-so.html
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
