On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Matthew Wakeling <matthew@flymine.org> wrote:
>
> We're about to purchase a new server to store some of our old databases, and
> I was wondering if someone could advise me on a RAID card. We want to make a
> 6-drive SATA RAID array out of 2TB drives, and it will be RAID 5 or 6
> because there will be zero write traffic. The priority is stuffing as much
> storage into a small 2U rack as possible, with performance less important.
> We will be running Debian Linux.
>
> People have mentioned Areca as making good RAID controllers. We're looking
> at the "Areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 SATA II" as a possibility. Does anyone
> have an opinion on whether it is a turkey or a star?
We run a 12xx series on our office server in RAID-6 over 8 1TB 7200RPM
server class SATA drives. Our production server runs the 1680 on top
of 16 15k5 seagates in RAID-10. The performance difference between
these two are enormous. Things that take minutes on the production
server can take hours on the office server. Production handles
1.5Million users, office handles 20 or 30 users.
I've been really happy with the reliability of the 12xx card here at
work. 100% uptime for a year, that machine goes down for kernel
updates and only that. But it's not worked that hard all day
everyday, so I can't compare its reliability with production in
RAID-10 which has had one drive fail the week it was delivered and
none since in 400+days. We have two hot spares there.
> Another possibility is a 3-ware card of some description.
They get good reviews as well. Both manufacturers have their "star"
performers, and their "utility" or work group class controllers. For
what you're doing the areca 12xx or 3ware 95xx series should do fine.
As far as drives go we've been really happy with WD of late, they make
large enterprise class SATA drives that don't pull a lot of power
(green series) and fast SATA drives that pull a bit more but are
faster (black series). We've used both and are quite happy with each.
We use a pair of blacks to build slony read slaves and they're very
fast, with write speeds of ~100MB/second and read speeds double that
in linux under sw RAID-1