jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Jun 4 14:57:46 CDT 2007
Jim, On top of all that, the Dell solution is painfully expensive. If it works, great, but try to upgrade. I bought an Areca controller for $490 (at that time, slightly higher now). 8x 320g drives at $120 at the time ($89 now). I bought them 4x the first time, then another two, then another two. The second system the Areca board was about $500 and I used 4x 500g drives at $140. Then another two. I will be buying the last two this coming month. I can buy them on my schedule, and the prices drop over time for the disk drives. My next system will use the same controller at ~$520 and 8x 750g drives for around $200 (by the time I get ready to build them.) Notice that the total $/MB is dropping, and in every case is waaaaaay below Dell prices. Of course there is always the issue of whether this RAID system would work at all in a Dell. I need some large raid arrays and simply cannot afford the Dell solution. Fortunately there are alternatives. ;-) And I just ran across this: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/400gb-raid0510.html John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 3:37 PM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Petulant PC John: Well that makes good sense. I will give any future client the option and they may not 'cheap-out'. While we are on the subject of Raids, I would like to pass along a warning to all the techs: <start of vent? A few weeks ago had a contract from Dell to install their new 'inexpensive' drive raids (Dell PowerVault 726N) and found them terrible. So be warned. First they are supposed to be a complete unit without the capability of accepting more drives, especially when they only house 4 drives (and dare to call it a raid 5), second the OS and data drives are folded and striped together and last it was not until I was onsite that it became apparent the larger (750GB) drives, sold to the client, were not capable of being installed in the units. Dell sales staff knowledge of their own high end products is very much lacking. Dell, ended up paying for the service call, which they were not happy with as it took 2 days to re-build/recover the Raid, (fortunately it was a weekend), the client was rightfully very upset and I, as a temporary Dell rep looked like an idiot... (I do not need any extra help thank-you.) A month before a friend had arranged for a number of huge Dells that were supposed to be used in a 'clustered' site. He had spoken at some length to senior Dell techs and reps as to whether there would be any issues to be concern with and was told, repeatedly, No. After 8 hours into the install it became apparent there were problems. Dell stopped replying to his calls and he had to find a solution on his own. 2 days later, he had found and installed an open-source solution as his client's were threatening to sue him and Dell. He was a 'Basket Case' when the job was finally completed after having not slept for 3 days and he swears he never trust Dell again. </End of vent> I will tag your post and maybe use a similar configuration for a client in the future. Jim -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 11:29 AM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Petulant PC Jim, Yes, you can do that. The raid 5 performance for the motherboards I was using was abysmal, down around 5 mbytes / sec write and 40 mbytes / sec read. And these were recent motherboards at the time I selected them (ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe). http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131011 With the dedicated raid controller with co-processor, the write speeds are up around 50 mb / sec and reads are around 400 mbytes / sec. It happens that I am building a SQL Server machine specifically. Thus the motherboard native timings simply did not work for me. I have another older machine which I set up to do the address validation software. I needed far higher speeds than was available at the motherboard level, specifically for reading quite large (1.5 gb) data files. I ended up buying a "RAMDISK" board and installing 3 gb of old ram I had hanging around. That gave me about 120 mbytes / sec throughput, read or write (only needed the read in this case). That speedup made an almost direct 1 to 1 difference in my application's speed, i.e. it was disk read bound. A normal disk drive reads about 50-60 mbytes / sec. The RAM disk doubled my throughput. Given that I am processing 50 and 100 gigabyte files, wringing the last ounce of speed is necessary. For simple backups however, a motherboard based solution is ok. Notice that I still don't endorse it simply because the MB becomes the weak link. If it dies for some reason, the raid array is trash unless you can get an identical motherboard. Once you move to a dedicated raid controller, if the MB dies you can move the raid controller to another machine and be back up and running fairly quickly. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 2:13 PM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Petulant PC Hi John: Can you not just use the SATA controller off the motherboard? All the new boards (GigaByte) come with at least 2 SATA connections. I have hooked up a 5 drive array off one connection and striped them and then added another 2 off the second connection for the OS drives, for a client. The mother board minus the RAM came to $276.00CAN, 1.7GHz, LAN card, Video Card and Sound Card built in plus RAID software. The performance, though not stellar is quite acceptable. That is a good price for the drives though. Jim _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com