3ware 7500-8 with 6 120 gig drives

[Stereodude]

I'm looking at setting up an 5 to 8 drive RAID-5 array. I'm looking at the 3ware cards. I think I want the 7500-8. Does anyone have experience with 3 ware products? I'm looking to set up an large array of drives to store all my data on. The current plan is to use 6 120gig drives to give me 600 gigs of raid 5 storage. I think I'd like 5400 RPM drives (because they run cooler), but they don't seem to have any price advantage over 7200 RPM drives.

Any tips, comments, or suggestions?

Stereodude

 

[Cliptin]

Does anyone have experience with 3 ware products?

Yes, I have a 6400 in RAID1. What do you want to know?

 

[Explorer]

I'm looking at setting up an 5 to 8 drive RAID-5 array. I'm looking at the 3ware cards. I think I want the 7500-8. Does anyone have experience with 3 ware products? I'm looking to set up an large array of drives to store all my data on. The current plan is to use 6 120gig drives to give me 600 gigs of raid 5 storage. I think I'd like 5400 RPM drives (because they run cooler), but they don't seem to have any price advantage over 7200 RPM drives.

If you plan on using 6-each 120 MB hard drives, you had better buy 7-each drives so that you have a spare to rebuild the array.

I think I'd like 5400 RPM drives (because they run cooler), but they don't seem to have any price advantage over 7200 RPM drives.

Why worry about heat, unless you are thinking about not using drive coolers -- which would be a mistake in a 24/7 box with either 5400 or 7200 RPM drives. In essence, with your 7-each hard drives, you also need to purchase 7-each ATA hot swap drive bays.


Concluding Comment:

If this RAID is not too urgent, I would definitely wait about 90 ~ 120 days for S-ATA drives to appear in quantity. S-ATA drives are very well geared towards RAID. There are already S-ATA-based RAID controllers coming to market, including 3Ware's Escalade 8500 4-port, 8-port, and 12-port series RAID controllers.

http://www.3ware.com/

http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata.asp

 

[Bozo]

I've been using a 3Ware controller for almost 3 years now. Never had a problem with it. Even works fine with IBMs 75 GXPs :-?

Bozo

 

[Stereodude]

"Now shipping" is a bit of a lie. No one has them.

I'd rather not pay the premium for SATA and be a beta tester. I may hold off a little longer for drive prices to fall, but I think I'll be steering clear of SATA.

Stereodude

 

[Explorer]

"Now shipping" is a bit of a lie. No one has them.

I'd rather not pay the premium for SATA and be a beta tester. I may hold off a little longer for drive prices to fall, but I think I'll be steering clear of SATA.

Stereodude

You'll find that SATA drives and hardware (controller cards) will actually cost a bit LESS than parallel ATA. The chip count on the PCB of the upcoming SATA hard drives will be low and there will only be one small connector on the hard drive as well.

Besides, SATA is much better geared towards RAID than conventional parallel ATA. If you go with parallel ATA drives for RAID, I'd suggest only using IBM brand drives (GXP75, GXP60, GXP120). With SATA drives, any will work well in a RAID implementation.

 

[Stereodude]

You'll find that SATA drives and hardware (controller cards) will actually cost a bit LESS than parallel ATA. The chip count on the PCB of the upcoming SATA hard drives will be low and there will only be one small connector on the hard drive as well.

Besides, SATA is much better geared towards RAID than conventional parallel ATA. If you go with parallel ATA drives for RAID, I'd suggest only using IBM brand drives (GXP75, GXP60, GXP120). With SATA drives, any will work well in a RAID implementation.

How can you say any of this with any certainty when neither the drives nor the controller card is being sold in the market? The newest/latest and greatest technology usually commands a premium regardless of if it costs the manufacturer less money to make or not.

Stereodude

 

[Explorer]

How can you say any of this with any certainty when neither the drives nor the controller card is being sold in the market? The newest/latest and greatest technology usually commands a premium regardless of if it costs the manufacturer less money to make or not...

I can say it with certainty because I've attended a SATA demonstration and have seen SATA in action. So there. I regularly attend demonstrations of various products -- not always computer-related. I'll admit that this took place back in... erm... April/May (PS: I believe I'm still under an NDA) and that this was not a production product. I can also say that this demo didn't blow me away, but I was still impressed at how well SATA works. One of the really cool things mentioned -- which I believe I can talk about -- is that SATA hard drives will be able to plug into SSCSI ports and vice versa! Well, I hope I'm not spilling the beans here too badly, but once Serial SCSI is out in late-2003 / early-2004, many if not most of the Serial SCSI controllers will also support connectivity with SATA hard drives, including mixtures of SATA and SSCSI on one multi-port serial storage controller. You probably won't be able to tell a SATA hard drive apart from a SSCSI hard drive, except for the printed information on the drive housing. This will include SSCSI RAID controllers as well, but the SATA and SSCSI drives would rather likely have to be members of different arrays if we're talking RAID levels 0,1,3,4,5.

As for pricing, it's true that the retailer can put whatever markup they want on an item. But, SATA is meant to a VOLUME product and will ramp up quite nicely over 2003. I saw some writing on a wall recently that said to not necessarily expect any 10kRPM SATA drives any time soon and that the likelihood of 10kRPM SATA drives will increase greatly with the advent of the 300 MB/s SATA bus in 2004.