[nycbug-talk] Fwd: Adaptec AAC raid support

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, Marco Scoffier wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 03:31:10PM -0500, bruno wrote:
>> If you do need performance software raid is sometimes not enough.
>>
> I was wondering if anyone had numbers on this.  Are we talking +5% cpu
> utilisation and -5% throughput or +20% and -20% or more ??  Searched a bit for
> numbers but came up dry.

I suspect this may be a case of needing to take a second look at things. 
I've subscribed to the "hardware raid is always faster" due to past 
experience with old hardware (ie: Pentium 133, PII-300) boxes.  It was 
pretty easy to see that hardware raid beat sw raid then.  These days I'm 
betting it's closer to a tie.

But then again vinum is simply too complicated for me, especially when 
trying to mirror the root partition.  I simply can't keep all that stuff 
straight in my head, so I don't trust myself to do a quick recovery should 
something go wrong.

On the other hand I pretty much trashed a machine with Adaptec's 
"raidutil" CLI tool.  My fault, but what a horrible, horrible tool.  No 
manpage either.  While I hate "are you sure (y/n)?" dialogs, I'd like to 
see that on destructive operations with something like raidutil.  Other 
than that, their cards have worked well for me so far; the only bugginess 
I see is in the management interface - sometimes the tools just can't 
connect to the card.

> Wouldn't you want to know this before hawking some hardware vendor's buggy
> proprietary closed-source ware on your sleek efficient less buggy everyday open
> source system ?? :)

Does anyone know what the situation is with other hardware?  I've got a 
few boxes running older 3Ware IDE controllers, and one running their newer 
SATA controller.  I'm very pleased with both for the most part.  How do 
they stand WRT developer docs?  What scsi raid hardware meets the "theo 
test" right now?

Thanks,

Charles

> -- 
> Marco
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