my investment in storage.

alrighty, lets talk SCSI. i know you love the sound of that, me too.

anyways, i did some wish listing at newegg and here's what i've conjured.

LSI Logic MegaRAID SCSI 320-0 Retail
Features:
Zero channel Ultra320 SCSI RAID storage controller
IA-64 ready
Intel GC80302 integrated I/O processor
64-bit, 66 MHz PCI
PCI 2.2 compliant
Integrated 64 MB ECC SDRAM cache memory
64-bit, 66 MHz PCI 2.2 Zero channel RAID (ZCR) Supports LSI53C1020 and LSI53C1030 SCSI controllers integrated on motherboards with SCSI interrupt steering logic Intel® GC80302 processor
Retail Box (See pics) more info

$216.00

Click to expand...

the manufacturer's site says it supports RAID 5.

SEAGATE SCSI 37GB 10,000RPM, MODEL# ST336607LC -X10 OEM, DRIVE ONLY
Cheetah 10K.6
Specifications:
Size: 37 Gigabytes
Interface: SCSI Wide 80 Pin Ultra320
Seek time: 4.7ms
Transfer Rate: 320MB/Sec
RPM:10,000
Cache: 8MB
OEM(Drive alone) 5 Year Manufacturer Warranty

$149.50 * 4 = $598.00

Click to expand...

yes four.

the plan is to go with those drives in RAID 0+1. like i said the manufacturer's site says the adapter will do RAID 5 so theoretically it should do 0+1 as it's essentially the same functions.

my questions are;

1. What's the quality on this hardware? I don't know much about hardware of this level so i'm not to good with deciding what's what.
2. How does this card sound? Seems a little pricey to me. I'm looking for something that will do 0+1. I don't care much for RAID 5 but it seems the deal is nested levels or no nested levels... period.
3. What's ZCR?
4. If you don't like the card then what is a good card to go with? I didn't see Promise anywhere on newegg and i'm to tired at the moment to look them up. This is also a place for any adapter card fan boys to speak up.
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   before anyone says it. i already looked into SATA. it's apparent that the only SATA drive worth buying is the raptor if you want any kind of speed. the rest seem to be IDE drives converted into SATA where the raptors are more SCSI. with the inherent issues different motherboards have had with serial ATA i'd rather go SCSI. besides it sounds cooler.

while I'm no expert in this area, I'll try to help as much as I can.

I had a look at storagereview's reliability database for those drives, and there were 14 entries for it. None died.

but then normally SCSI drives are pretty high quality.

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RAID 5 is somewhat better than RAID 0+1 because with your 4x 36GB drives, you have 108GB of space and fault tolerance for 1 drive with RAID 5, but just 72GB of space and fault tolerance for 1 drive with RAID 0+1.

I wrote a short explanation of RAID 5 and 0+1 on another thread. This is what I wrote:

"raid level 5 offers security and speed, but requires several disks. with severall disks, it basically stripes the system data + parity data to all the drives, and if one drive fails, the data on that drive can be rebuilt from the parity data from all the other drives. Losing 2 disks at the same time leads to the loss of all data. The available space is equal to (number of drives - 1) x size of smallest disk. You need at least 3 drives for this setup.

another possibility is level 1+0, basically a mirror array made up of 2 striped arrays. You need at least 4 drives for this kind of setup. Your storage capacity will be half of the total capacity of all your drives"

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And I have another suggestion.

Maybe there are better deals than Seagate's 10k rpm, 36GB drives for $150 each. I've seen Fujitsu MAM series, 36GB, 15k rpm drives for around $110 each at pricewatch. These are a lot faster than the Seagate, and also cheaper too.

Performance head to head: http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...=1&numDrives=1&devID_0=9&devID_1=104&devCnt=2

The Seagate drive in that is not the exact same drive as the one you chose, but should be very close in performance, as it is also 10k rpm, 18GB per platter.

But in any case, a 15k rpm drive will nearly always be faster than a 10k rpm drive in all respects.

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I am not very familiar with SCSI RAID controllers though. They are a bit above my budget...

Maybe other members could help you with that.

Starting with the adapter: ZCR is normally used for applying RAID configurations to the existing SCSI controllers on the mainboard. In this case, look at the jpg here:

http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp?image=16-118-012-02.JPG/16-118-012-03.JPG/16-118-012-01.JPG

and you can see that it actually has no physical connections for the drives. This will not be a good choice, unless your planar has supported chips, like the LSI 1033(if my memory is working properly).

On the subject of MBs or planars, which one are you basing the system on? Having 64 bit slots is a very good idea to prevent PCI bottlenecks, PCI-X is best. I get reads out of ATTO in the 70+ MB/s range out of 36GB and 147GB 15K drives. Combining 2 or more will quickly saturate the PCI bus, SCSI channel saturation could also become an issue.

I have to agree with shiyan, the Fujitsu drives are very good and seem perfectly reliable for long term use. Watch the warranties on sites, since many sites are offerring relabeled units with one year warranties.

Additionally, the LC series suffix denotes 80 pin SCA connections and requires either SCA adapters or a hot swap backplane. The adapters can have performance and reliability issues, while the SCA backplanes and hot swap cages add substantially to the cost.


RAID level selection should largely depend on what you are trying to use the array for and what planar and budget you have to accomplish the solution. What are your constraints and usage patterns going to be? Knowing this, it'd be easier to modify selection of controller, cables and possible backplanes. The drives are the easy part.

well i'm on an intranet and my machine is frequently used to serve files, most of which ranging from 200-700MB. i want the capacity to use may machine and serve files to whomever without any noticeable drop in performance. i'm currently running 80GB JB's and they can't handle the demand. even desktop browsing is choppy.

basically i want uncompromising speed in 4 drives.

Well if you have the option for raid 5 id choose to go that way. Raid 5 has much higher preformance then a Raid 0+1 combination. Besides that you won't be loosing 2 drives for back only 1 drive on a Raid 5 is used for the parity information over the course of the drives. Besides that the data transfering is higher on a Raid 5 setup compared to a Raid 0+1. Or if you get a Raid 3 on the card it might be something to look into because it has the highest transfer rate out of all the raid drives.

http://www.raidweb.com/whatis.html

I know SCSI sounds cool but, I just set up a 4 drive raid 5 array with 4 raptors and a Promise S150 Frastrak SX4 card. The card is about $150 and you need ram for it, 128MB or 256MB. This setup is extremely fast and should be as fast as a 10K SCSI raid 5 setup but cheaper. Just another option that I have personally used.

^^ actually that makes SATA more attractive considering the price difference in adapter cards.

215 for and adaptor plus even 110 a peice for the FUJI's that were mentioned plus a termitanor for $15 is around $700. 150 for and adaptor plus 108*4 for the drives is less then 600 total. how much was the memory you bought?

oh yeah. i picked 10k rpm drives because i was afraid they may be a bit to noisey. logic being SCSI's are made to be used in servers mostly so in that environment noise emition isn't an issue since there's so many loaded down machines in the same area making a ton of noise.

bump for nikhsub1

here's the performance head to head comparison of the MAM and Raptor: http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...=1&numDrives=1&devID_0=249&devID_1=9&devCnt=2

the Raptor is slightly better for workstation/desktop, and the MAM is much better for server usage.

the MAM is noisier.

The reason that the MAM can lose to the Raptor slightly in Workstation/Desktop yet totally dominates the Server tests is probably due to its much faster seek times. (why it loses Workstation/Desktop is still a mystery to me, I'm still trying to work this out.)

So if you are going to use it for workstation use and require quiet, then the Raptor setup would be the better choice. But if you are building a server then I'd definitely recommend the MAM.

I never did catch what you were going to use it for... did I miss it?

RAID 5 is actualy terrible in terms of write performance. I tested 4 10k U320 drives on a compaw DL380 and I think writes were around 15mb/s max, reads were good though, more around 120mb/s but I think that's terrible for how much your spending. I would just get a cheap U160 controller and 2 15k SCSI drives, run a software RAID 0 and back em up with a cheap IDE drive at night, save case, get better performance.....don't see how you lose.

here's performance report on different RAID levels:
http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002q4/ideraid/index.x?pg=1

they were using IDE RAID, but the results should probably still apply to SCSI RAID.

here are 2 other reviews of RAID controllers (in which the performance of different RAID levels were compared) that might help you in choosing which RAID level you run:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/raid-roundup.html

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/promise-tx4000.html

a lot of tables and graphs with different RAID levels and numbers of hard disks!