jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Dec 4 18:28:39 CST 2007
As you probably know I have some largish databases in SQL Server. I went out and bought hardware raid controller boards. The key seems to be to get a coprocessor built into the board to do the XOR and manipulating the striping. I use the Areca 1220 PCI Express card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131004 I use 8 drives in a Raid 6 configuration. I have two of these things in two different servers. One uses 8 320g hard drives, the other uses 8 500g hard drives. The streaming read speed is up around 400 meg bytes / second SUSTAINED. Writes are much lower, down around 60 IIRC. but for my purposes the read is the important part. Of course the controller by itself was twice as expensive as my entire motherboard, but when you start doing a calculation of the entire server with all the parts and pieces, a $500 card is "only" 20% - 25% of the cost. And given how much it impacts the system speed it is definitely worth it. But of course this is not your dev desktop machine. I truly don't understand how the built-in raid can be so slow. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 7:13 PM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] Interesting Laptop / Vista commentary That is a joke... why bother. I had a nice ASUS mother board bought a few years back and discovered that it had a Promise Technology Raid (0 and 1) on the board after updating the BIOS. As it was an older board it was relegated to a backup server but it seems to work well for mirroring. Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 9:55 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] Interesting Laptop / Vista commentary The motherboard chipsets (at least NVidia) SUCK at handling raid. I know because I have tried, and the disk transfer rates were abysmal, as in as low as 5 mbytes / sec. It is barely OK as a C: drive but for real data access needs you truly have to look elsewhere. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 12:37 PM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] Interesting Laptop / Vista commentary I think that with cheap mother boards coming with built in raid and sata controllers having software now doing this process is just slow and inefficient. Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Drew Wutka Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 9:01 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] Interesting Laptop / Vista commentary Mirrored drives!!!! One of the best features, IMHO, of Windows 2000, is that it brought along dynamic disks. However, with 2000 Pro, XP, (and, as far as I know Vista), you can only stripe and create RAID5s. To mirror a dynamic drive, you need a server OS, Windows 2000 server, 2003 server. You can, of course, do all of this with a RAID controller too. In fact, in the last year or two, motherboards have been coming out with RAID controllers out there, but before that, they were pretty expensive. A mirrored drive makes life a LOT easier, especially if you have a system that you NEED to depend on. What's the worst case scenario for a development machine? Losing the hard drive. Well, if you have two drives mirrored, you can lose one, and you are completely unaffected. Drew -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Charlotte Foust Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 10:21 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] Interesting Laptop / Vista commentary So what ARE the best reasons for running a server OS on a desktop? Charlotte Foust The information contained in this transmission is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain II-VI Proprietary and/or II-VI BusinessSensitve material. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately and destroy the material in its entirety, whether electronic or hard copy. 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