LSI Megaraid i4

[The JoJo]

Has anyone used one of these?

I just ordered one, hoping to build a Raid-5 with Samsung 160gb drives. Supposedly I can resize the array later when I add more drives to it. Has anyone any experience of this?

Some specs:
PCI short card
Integrated I/O processor
All ATA drive modes supported up to UDMA 100
Re-flashable BOIS for easy firmware upgrades
Two dual-channel ATA/100 controllers
16 MB of integrated ECC SDRAM Memory
Multi-controller support
Advanced management and configuration utilities
Supports to up 40 logical drives and 8 physical drives per controller
Auto resume during array reconstruction
FlexRAID™: Online capacity expansion and online RAID level migration


More here:
http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid_serial_ata_storage_adapters/5114000216a.html

 

[Bozo]

Don't know much about that RAID controller, but I would check out the software package that comes with it. The 3Ware controller monitoring software just plain sucks. To do a verify of the RAID array setup, you must schedule it. You just can't tell it to verify the drives. You can't test the system by disabling one drive in software to check your alarm setup. The interface for the software is web based. The worst part is the alarming. The software uses E-Mail to notify you something is wrong with the array. And only one E-Mail address at that. The other RAID controllers I'm familier with use messenger(?) which broadcast to 6 different computers. No E-Mail client required. In our systems, we do not have E-Mail.
Just some thoughts....

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[The JoJo]

Thanks, I'll check that out when it arrives.

On a side note, this cost a lot less than a 3ware capable for eight drives (7506-8). Althoug one should probably compare this to the one capable to handle 4 drives.

 

[Mercutio]

That i960 CPU tops out at IIRC 80MHz. The i4 can't be much of a hardware RAID5 controller.

 

[The JoJo]

Yup, can't disagree with that. I think the card is a few years old already.

My requirements speed wise are fortunately not big. I'm mostly after getting some fault tolerance to all the drives I have at the moment. The usage is pretty low.

 

[The JoJo]

I think the card was something like 250 €. I thought about getting the 7506-8, but that was about 450€, so the features and intended use compared to price/performance was much better for this one.

 

[The JoJo]

Drive pricing for Samsung here:

Samsung 160GB 8MB SATA 118€
Samsung 160GB 8MB PATA 114€
Samsung 160GB PATA 100€

 

[Mercutio]

Behold the power of the Euro (I don't have "C with a line through it" key).
I can't ever remember something being cheaper in Europe than in the US, but that Samsung SATA drive appears to be.

 

[sechs]

You mean, behold the power of the ever-weakening dollar. It's our prices on imports that are going up, not Europe's that are going down.

 

[Mercutio]

Yeah, but if I start talking about whose monetary policies are causing that problem and how pissed-off it makes me, Howell will give me a mod-slap.

Time was, $1US = $2AU
Now it's $1US = $1.30AU

That's a pretty big change.

 

[Howell]

:nono:

 

[Onomatopoeic]

Of the various brands available, LSI MegaRAID host bus RAID controllers are the best overall.





A good business name:
€uro$ ¢afe

 

[The JoJo]

Good to know your opinion.

The card is coming from the UK, hopefully here next week. A friend ordered 2 cards, one for each.

Where to get 500-600GB of free space for backup before building the raid....hmmm......

 

[Onomatopoeic]

Good to know your opinion.

I've only used the SCSI MegaRAID models; they work superbly.

Where to get 500-600GB of free space for backup before building the raid....hmmm......

Have a tape drive handy???

 

[The JoJo]

Unfortunately not, but maybe I can borrow a AIT from a friend.....

 

[Mercutio]

I don't know about that Gary. ICP Vortex cards are pretty nice too.

 

[Pradeep]

Yeah, but if I start talking about whose monetary policies are causing that problem and how pissed-off it makes me, Howell will give me a mod-slap.

Time was, $1US = $2AU
Now it's $1US = $1.30AU

That's a pretty big change.

There was a time when US$1=AUS$0.7. Before they deregulated it.

I love getting paid in AUS$ right now

 

[Mercutio]

How are you getting paid in KoalaBucks? I though you were in the fast growing field of Retail Stock Engineering... or is that just the cover you use?

 

[Pradeep]

Well I still do some on-line work for another company, and get paid in Aus for that.

Actually I'm still looking for a job, yesterday I applied at OfficeDespot for a tech sales part time position, they are going to call me for a second interview. Biggest problem there is I'm over qualified. The previous job offer I got, they were/are still waiting on the background check, which would be pretty hard since at the time I didn't have an SS# or NY drivers license. I've now got all the paperwork crap in hand, so hopefully not too much trouble this time.

 

[Explorer]

I don't know about that Gary. ICP Vortex cards are pretty nice too.

As long as we're talking SCSI, yes, ICP Vortex is nice, but LSI Logic MegaRAID SCSI takes a backseat to nobody in the performance department -- including ICP Vortex. I don't know how the two's ATA and SATA offerings match up.

ICP Vortex is about the only true competitor to MegaRAID's midrange these days. That's probably why Adaptec bought them last year. Still, you can buy a similarly spec'd LSI Logic MegaRAID controller for less (talking 1-channel and 2-channel models at this point). But, ICP Vortex doesn't have comparable models to LSI Logic's high end -- such as the 4 channel models.

The MegaRAID 320-4X (PCI-X) is a force to be reckoned with... until the SAS version arrives ...with PCI Express host connection ...as in full-duplex drives talking to a full-duplex RAID talking to a full-duplex PCI channel ...talking to a full-duplex HyperTransport :shake2:

 

[The JoJo]

Has any of you gentlemen used the Flexraid system to add a drive to an existing Raid-5 system, therefore expanding it to a larger size?
I'm under the impression that this is possible?

I'm hoping to set up a Raid-5 now and later on add more drives to it without needing to build it from scratch.

I'm about to search for suitable filesystems for this also, planning to use this under linux.

 

[BooST]

I don't have any experience with Flexraid, but I know that both my Promise Fastrax S150 SX4 and 3Ware Escalade 8506 will do it. I see it safe to assume that you can do it. One warning though, the Promise card took about 2 days to add the new drive to the array.

 

[The JoJo]

Thanks Boost. I didn't check the 8506, but didn't see a similar future mentioned on the 7506? Did I just miss it?

THe 9xxx series has the OCE (on-line capacity expansion or something like that).

 

[The JoJo]

Still haven't gotten the card.

Found a lot of links an comments on this card over at www.2cpu.com.

 

[The JoJo]

Getting the card tomorrow.

Going to run 5*160GB Samsung SP80 drives, not the 8mb version (2mb? cant remember). This means that I'm going to have to put 2 drives on one of the channels.

 

[Bozo]

Powerquest makes software to enlarge a RAID setup. It's not hardware specific either.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Bozo]

Symantec took over Powerquest. I belive this will work:
http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/products/products.cfm?ProductID=345&EID=0


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[The JoJo]

Thanks Bozo!

I'm going to stick the card and the drives in my RH9 system, and use Reiserfs with it. Reiserfs programs includes resize_reiserfs, which allows you to resize an unmounted partition.

 

[The JoJo]

Ok, I've got the card, used the webbios to set up a raid-5 with 64KB stripe size, read ahead, write back.
Going to add the 2 other drives when I've been able to make a partition and move the data to the raid.

 

[The JoJo]

Just partitioned and formatted the drive with reiserfs. Moving 20 GB of stuff from one other drive to the raid resulted in about 12MB writing speed.
As soon as all the copying is done, I'll add another drive to the array.

Anyone used parted to enlarge a partition? Working with RH9.

 

[Mercutio]

I use it fairly often when I'm upgrading disks on my fileservers. It's fairly painless.

 

[The JoJo]

Just added a fourth drive to the array, which is being reconstructed. So far so good.

 

[The JoJo]

34% into reconstruction, after 5 hours...Guess I'll get to copy some more stuff in the morning.

 

[The JoJo]

The reconstruction took all night. I'm wondering if the rebuild rate on the controller affects that. I'm going to change that from the default 30% to 80%.

I just copied stuff from a Samsung 5400rpm drive to the raid, on the same host. 110GB later, the transfer rate came to about 11MB/s. This is now with 4 160GB drives on the controller, in raid-5.

I need to dd my system to another drive, and then I'll add the fifth and final drive to the array. I'll probably do that tomorrow. I'll test the write speed then also.

 

[The JoJo]

Results from a highly respected and scientifically established benchmark (no, not Sandra you fools) resulted in a read speed of about 12MB/s, pretty close to the write speed, which I'll test later.

The benchmark? Just "time cp filename /dev/null" .....

 

[The JoJo]

Almost forgot, after an upgrade of parted and libreiserfs, the resizing if the 5 drive array went smooth. Just told parted to "resize 1 0.000 610523.000" and away it went. It even did a resize on the reiserfs filesystem while it was at it.

 

[The JoJo]

Now I just need a god case for all this, the current one can't handle all the disks.

After looking at compucase and antec getting a case for a max of 9drives + floppy is pretty...challenging. If one don't want to loose an arm and a leg ....

 

[timwhit]

Only 12MB/s? I thought you would get higher read scores than that with so many drives? I can understand low writes with an old controller, but maybe something is configured wrong.

 

[The JoJo]

Only 12MB/s? I thought you would get higher read scores than that with so many drives? I can understand low writes with an old controller, but maybe something is configured wrong.

That's what I thought first, only 12. Specially when the write was similar..

I just cat'ed 27GB of big files to /dev/null, and some 1-2GB files also, and the speed was between 22-29MB/s, hovering on average at 25MB/s.

That's more like it, double the read speed compared to write speed!

 

[The JoJo]

Hdparm gives me 188MB/s for buffered reads, and 28MB/s for normal reads.