Alex Turner wrote:
> Not at random access in RAID 10 they aren't, and anyone with their
> head screwed on right is using RAID 10. The 9500S will still beat the
> Areca cards at RAID 10 database access patern.
The max 256MB onboard for 3ware cards is disappointing though. While
good enough for 95% of cases, there's that 5% that could use a gig or
two of onboard ram for ultrafast updates. For example, I'm specing out
an upgrade to our current data processing server. Instead of the
traditional 6xFast-Server-HDs, we're gonna go for broke and do
32xConsumer-HDs. This will give us mega I/O bandwidth but we're
vulnerable to random access since consumer-grade HDs don't have the RPMs
or the queueing-smarts. This means we're very dependent on the
controller using onboard RAM to do I/O scheduling. 256MB divided over
4/6/8 drives -- OK. 256MB divided over 32 drives -- ugh, the HD's
buffers are bigger than the RAM alotted to it.
At least this is how it seems it would work from thinking through all
the factors. Unfortunately, I haven't found anybody else who has gone
this route and reported their results so I guess we're the guinea pig.