RAID 0 again

[Bozo]

I haven't read the entire article, but apparently this site thinks Anand and Storage Review are wrong.

http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/515?


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Mercutio]

The article blithely ignores the vast increase in the likelihood of data loss and at the same time derides the common "desktop storage expert" opinion of RAID0.

They test with synthetic benchmarks only, they DON'T use the same benchmarks as either Anand or SR (what's a "storagemark"?), and offer only subjective statements regarding real world performance.

In short, I think this is a comedy piece, not a serious article.

 

[jtr1962]

I had a little fun with this topic on SR:

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=16484&st=0&#entry175821

:lol: :mrgrn: :lol:

 

[Santilli]

Yes, SATA Raid 0, and ide raid 0 generally suck. We know that.

Perhaps with SATA2 we'll finally see something to start considering giving up scsi for, but I doubt it.

As JTR1962 has posted, using ATTO, you can get bumps in speed from certain block sizes, and functions, being held in cache, on both scsi drives, and controllers for easy access, not to mention stripping access seems faster, and, data sequential data transfer certainly is.

I strongly suspect the results depend on how much money you throw at it.
The current card I'm using, Adaptec 21010S or something like that, is supposed to raid two 320 channels, at low cost. Sure it does, but performance is just so so.

I'm sure if I had the bucks, and picked up a PCI-X dual channel raid card,
and hooked up my raid to that, the snap would be considerably more.

None the less, with 48 mb of cache on the card, and about 32, IIRC, on the four drives, that's a lot of data that can be cached, and accessed quickly. I suspect Seagates alogorithims to take advantage of such setups, and Adaptec's, to a much lesser degree.

By the way, I tried two, three, and four drives, and four was noticeably quicker then two, or three, stripped accross two channels.


Anyone ever used an Adaptec 21010S to stripe SCA drives, to boot from, and the motherboard channels?

s

 

[Santilli]

You know I really have to say, the irony of Davin and Eugene actually saying something bad about ide, or SATA drive setups, that would increase their advertizers sales, is dripping.

After my Maxtor/Promiselless experience, I figured that out, early on.

Odd that I was ridiculed for that, and commenting on it, and for stating my position on the difference between ide raid, and scsi raid, and the difference in speed. Now, they finally test and quantify what I've known for a long time...

It's also rather odd that their test actually do reflect the failing of either chipsets, or card quality, interface ability, or algorithims. I took a lot of garbage for saying ide just wasn't near the quality of scsi, and now they finally quantify that, somewhat, but still pick drives, cards, and cables that don't show the real difference in performance possible, with a properly setup Raid 0 SCSI system.

Wonder how a PCI-X system, with an LSI dual channel raid card, and 4 current generation X 15's would scale and do in their tests?

I do know some of the mac guys were getting near 230 mb/sec with scsi 320, and 4-8 drives...

s

 

[jtr1962]

As JTR1962 has posted, using ATTO, you can get bumps in speed from certain block sizes, and functions, being held in cache, on both scsi drives, and controllers for easy access, not to mention stripping access seems faster, and, data sequential data transfer certainly is.

Actually, Greg, that was a 384MB ramdrive that I ran Atto on, but you're right, I'd probably get similar results with data held in cache. I'd also like to point out my system is over 5 years old, with a 112MHz FSB and PC133. I'd probably get 5x the speed on a modern system.

For all the talk over there about RAID 0 to increase speed, and all the money spent on it, I can't help but think buying a M/B with 4GB of RAM would be more effective, and cheaper. Once you load something, it'll likely stay in RAM cache until you reboot. 4GB not enough? Buy a 64-bit system. Some of those support up to 64 GB RAM without using performance robbing PAE like 32-bit systems.

 

[Howell]

:bow: :bow:
:bow: :bow:
:bow: :bow:
:bow: :bow:

 

[Santilli]

Howell:
:salut: :salut: :salut: :wink:

Anyway, I don't fully agree, but I do resemble that remark. If 2 gig sticks ever become reasonable, I can run 12 gigs of ram, and with one gig sticks, 6 gig.

Funny part is I've heard guys with similar setups that can't notice much difference between 1 gig, and 2 gigs of ram, unless they are running emulation. Of course, if you can load a 1 gig webpage, I can really start seeing the benefits.

Keep in mind also, that the idea of cheap ram is a short term situtation.
It's only been possible recently, and, it's too bad this hasn't transfered over to ram drives, for pci slots...


s

 

[Pradeep]

Howell:

Funny part is I've heard guys with similar setups that can't notice much difference between 1 gig, and 2 gigs of ram, unless they are running emulation. Of course, if you can load a 1 gig webpage, I can really start seeing the benefits.

Keep in mind also, that the idea of cheap ram is a short term situtation.
It's only been possible recently, and, it's too bad this hasn't transfered over to ram drives, for pci slots...
s

1GB of RAM is plenty for IE, email etc. In fact 512MB would be enough in that instance. I guess nowadays with much higher system RAM limits then before, it doesn't make sense to hook up slower types of RAM and hitch it onto the PCI bus. Better to spend that money on more system RAM, where the CPU can access it much faster.

On a somewhat related note, I've been comparing the speed of our dual Xeon 2.4, with HT on and off. Doing OCR with ABBY FineReader, it's much faster with HT turned off. We had one of the new dual Xeons around last week, a Dell Precision 470 workstation with the faster bus, shame I didn't get a chance to benchmark it before it went out to a customer. It only had the one CPU tho.

 

[Santilli]

And how does one turn hyperthreading off, and on, to test?

s

 

[P5-133XL]

HT is turned off in your MB's CMOS setup.

 

[Santilli]

Thanks
s

 

[LunarMist]

 

[Santilli]

ROFL :excl:
That Promise stuff just kills me. They haven't changed since they started.

I hate to admit, that through a number of factors, I have an actual, Promise ATA 133 mhz dual channel card up and working in my Xeon machine.

I bought a Sonnet Tempo Trio card for the mac. Wouldn't work, since there is not enough room in memory for it's expanded drivers, after you factor in the couple other cards I have. Couldn't get my money back, so I lost 20 bucks, and got a Tempo Trio for the pc side.

It came WITHOUT DRIVERS. XP installed drivers for the USB 2, and the firewire, but to get drivers for the card, I had to watch the screen on boot, see what card was detected, go to the promiseless site(Greg shudders convulsively), download, and install the driver for it.

The shock is, it WORKS :excl: :wink: :mrgrn:

I bought a premium ATA 133 round cable, and hooked the Quaxtor 160 GIG up, and it actually works, doing sustained data transfers at a single bound, etc.

s

 

[Bozo]

I also had a Promise Fasttrak card that sucked donkey balls.

But I have used about a dozen Promise Ultra 100 cards without a problem.

Still don't trust Promise though.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[e_dawg]

I have been using a Promise FastTrak TX2000 RAID card that was fast and extremely stable until recently. I upgraded the BIOS and drivers and noticed that it wasn't nearly as stable. Then I switched to XP from 2000 thinking that the newer drivers were probably designed more for XP. It worked for a while then started getting unstable again. After switching to the older drivers, the stability returned, but only temporarily. After switching back to 2000 from XP and using the old drivers, it remains unstable. I don't know what happened. Perhaps it is the new BIOS that is flaky?

I am cursing Promise now because my desktop is useless while I sort this thing out, but I can't forget that it was fabulously stable for about a year. I wish I knew what went wrong.

 

[e_dawg]

For all the talk over there about RAID 0 to increase speed, and all the money spent on it, I can't help but think buying a M/B with 4GB of RAM would be more effective, and cheaper. Once you load something, it'll likely stay in RAM cache until you reboot. ...

I can't help but think that it will get paged out to disk anyways. Doesn't everything get paged out to disk eventually? I thought it was only a matter of time...

 

[jtr1962]

I can't help but think that it will get paged out to disk anyways. Doesn't everything get paged out to disk eventually? I thought it was only a matter of time...

Not sure about other OSes but with Win9x you use the line ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 in the [386Enh] section of the system.ini file. This seems to effectively prevent swap file usage unless you really are using most of the physical memory. The only time I remember seeing the swap file size anything other than 0 is when I was scanning some slides. Each picture was something like 25 megapixels, so they took up ~75MB of RAM each. By the time I scanned about 8 pictures I heard the machine start paging. I had 768 MB RAM at the time. I recently picked up two 256 MB sticks on eBay for only $43 shipped, so I removed my last two 128MB sticks. Now the M/B is maxed out at 1GB. Short of having over 10 or so slide scans open at once I don't anticipate ever hitting the swap file again.

There has to be some equivalent setting in Win2000/XP/Linux. Also, these operating systems use a linear address space going to xFFFFFFFF (i.e. 4GB). A few hundred MB of this space is reserved for hardware but the rest is divided between real and virtual memory, up to 3.5 to 3.8 GB total. If your system already has 4GB of physical memory, it wouldn't even have any addresses left for virtual memory, and thus wouldn't hit the swap file, or even need one. That's my take on it, anyway. I wish cas was around-he would have a better answer than I would. Incidentally, the address space on Win9x is only 2GB, so theoretically a system with 2GB RAM wouldn't ever have or need a sawp file. In practice Win9x only works with up to 1.5GB physical memory, and then only sometimes. To ensure stability, I wouldn't use more than 1GB in a Win9x system. If I needed more, I would use Win2000 or Linux.

 

[miksmi]

Santilli,

What IDE/ATA controllers do you like? Ok, I'm really looking for 2-port SATA. Others have recommended (I won't name names but here's the thread ) a Promise SATA150 TX2plus. Now's your chance to talk me out of it.

Thanks for your guidance.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm a big fan of the SATA cards based on the SiI 3112a chipset (or 3112r if you need cheap RAID). The retail raptors used to ship with a card that had this chipset, and countless motherboards (including those from ASUS) use this chipset as well. They also have a 4-port version (3114) that is supposed to be pretty good.

 

[miksmi]

I'm a big fan of the SATA cards based on the SiI 3112a chipset (or 3112r if you need cheap RAID).

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't need RAID. I googled and looked on Silicon Image but didn't find a controller manufacturer using this chipset. Who makes such a beast?

 

[Santilli]

Santilli,

What IDE/ATA controllers do you like? Ok, I'm really looking for 2-port SATA. Others have recommended (I won't name names but here's the thread ) a Promise SATA150 TX2plus. Now's your chance to talk me out of it.

The only controllers I really trust are either Intel chipset based, or 3 Ware. None are cheap.

I'm not very experienced with ide/ata stuff, so everytime I end up trying something, I usually get shafted, and it costs me money. Talk to the guys here, or, go to Costco, buy a Maxtor that's bagged with a Promise 133 card, with cable, and try it. If it doesn't work, return the entire damn thing, keep your reciept, and, they don't charge for restocking or any of that other trash.

www.costco.com is a great resource.

Also consider alternate types of storage. SATA cards are pretty cheap, and very fast. Firewire, for an internal solution, for backup, seems to be stable.

Whatever you do, do net searches for the product you are going to buy and see what others have to say.

Another possibility that you might consider is an ide removeable drive
box, with four slots. I saw one for 150 bucks. uses two channels, for four drives, and it looks like a great mass storage solution. Another idea is a hotswap removeable drive box, either firewire or ide.

http://www.granitedigital.com/

While expensive, their stuff works.

I went through all this, and decided on this solution:
A supermicro SCA box, scsi, for about 160 bucks from www.newegg.com.
It comes with a very good cable, terminates itself, and assigns scsi id's to any drive you plug into the slots.
So, all you need is a 160 or 320 scsi card. LSI is my choice, or adaptec, or atto. Whatever you can get cheap. Dual channel would be ideal, or a raid card, but they are bucks up. You figure you can get one drive to boot from, and then have 4 drives to either raid 1 or plug and use for
backup and storage.
You could also do the same using SATA, but I would be reluctant, since SATA2 is on the way.

Anyway, good luck.....

s

 

[miksmi]

WOW, thanks Santilli! A lot to digest! All the Intel and 3ware SATA cards seem to be 64bit. Did I miss any?

I'm looking for a PCI 32-bit card for a Shuttle SS40G.

 

[Santilli]

Why bother? It already has ATA 100 on the motherboard. How many drives can you fit in this thing?
Buy a couple drives for the 100 channel, and use that, and save yourself some money.

SATA has yet to approach scsi as an interface, and, ATA is fine for mass storage.

S

 

[miksmi]

Shuttle SS40G fits 3 drives (I only need 2). I was attracted to SATA because of the low additional cost ($5 per drive, see below).

Another issue is I'd like to (someday) use the drives in a file server; my plan:

Buy 2 drives for SS40G to increase image editing performance.
(7200rpm seems to be a price/performance sweet spot.)
When 10000rpm prices drop, move 7200rpm drives to a file server.
File server's old mobo doesn't support ATA-6 48-bit LBA; its 180GB disk has 137MB accessible.
So, file server needs new PATA controller to use >137GB on current disk.

Since the old mobo needs a controller, buy SATA/PATA controller and move it with the drives. (Mobo is a Dell Dimension XPS D300, PentiumII 300MHz.)

E.g., Hitachi Deskstar 7K250:
newegg $62 HDS722580VLAT20 pata 80gb 2mb
newegg $67 HDS722580VLSA80 sata 80gb 8mb
newegg $42 Promise SATA150 TX2plus (2-port SATA/150 + 1 PATA/133)

The other side of the coin, as you've pointed out, is to skip SATA and stick with PATA. Buy a PATA controller when it's time to move drives from Shuttle to file server.

Maybe I'm trying to justify drives with those little SATA cables

Feel free to comment on my plan (Santilli or anyone).

 

[blakerwry]

The other side of the coin, as you've pointed out, is to skip SATA and stick with PATA. Buy a PATA controller when it's time to move drives from Shuttle to file server.

This is the most practical solution.

the addition of a PCI card will negate any benefit of the S-ATA cables in the shuttle anyway. Good luck with 2 hard drives, I find even 1 hard drive gets rather warm in the shuttle's I have. (Seagate ATA IV idles in mid 40's while Maxtor DM+9 idles near 50C) The same seagate idled in the 30's in the 3 previous cases. My other maxtors idle in the low 40's/high 30's when installed in a normal case.

 

[blakerwry]

btw, those temps above... that's one hard drive per shuttle.

 

[Bozo]

Another thing to consider about a SATA drive. The connectors. They suck and are very easy to break....I know

Once the connectors are broke on the hard drive, the drive is worthless. If you are installing them in a very tight space, it would be very easy to break them. Just trying to to work in the case with a SATA drive already connected can break the connector.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[miksmi]

Thanks for thinking this plan out with me.

This is the most practical solution.

You're such a killjoy!

(Seagate ATA IV idles in mid 40's while Maxtor DM+9 idles near 50C) The same seagate idled in the 30's in the 3 previous cases. My other maxtors idle in the low 40's/high 30's when installed in a normal case.

Yikes! That's hot! You make some great points.

..SATA drive. The connectors. They suck and are very easy to break.

That't not a good thing.

Ok, I'll pass on SATA due to the flimsy connectors and the PCI card negating any benefit of SATA cables in the cramped Shuttle.

Has the flimsy connector issue been addressed in the next rev of the SATA spec?

I'm bummed about the heat issue with 2 drives in the SS40G.

 

[blakerwry]

My personal opinion, if you want an optical drive in that ss40 case, You can have 1 3.5" hard drive and possibly a laptop or slim line drive.

If you removed the optical drive you could probably have 2 7200rpm drives.