Raid Adapter for 6+ 1.5TB drives?

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nicholasfarmer

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
238
system:
MB : GA-965P-DQ6 (rev. 3.3)
HD : six Seagate 1.5TB 7200 drives (ST315005N1A1AS-RK)

Problem:
Ive researched Areca, Adaptec, 3ware, Highpoint, and Promise Raid cards.
None of them say they "support" the Seagate 1.5TB drives. Adaptec 5805 gets close with the ST31500341AS.

So:
I need some help selecting a raid controller that will work with these drives and have good to great performance. Does anyone have any real world experence with these drives and running a hardware raid without any issues? Ive looked through the 10TB+ club and see the Adaptec cards pop up a lot.

Any helpful information would be great. Im trying to avoid spending $500 on a card and find out its not going to work.
 
What kind of slot are you trying to fit this card into? Do I dare assume you'll be using the 2nd PCIe x16 slot for the RAID card? Normally I'd plug the Dell Perc 5/i and 6/i SAS cards here since you can get working pulls for cheap, but my current testing indicates they have quirky performance with my 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives. Do you already have the Seagate 1.5TB drives, or are you open to getting other 1.5TB drives?

Here's the performance of my 6 x Samsung 1.5TB (5400RPM) RAID-5 on a Perc 5/i
iometersa.png


Not bad for a card you can get for $100.
 
I do plan to use the second x16 slot.
This system is one of many and some day it will take over as a file/media server for the family.

Is there something against using the x16 slot or just considered a waste?

I already have the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives but if I cannot find a controller within the next 30 days they are going to be returned or sold for something better.

After more research, ive found other forums that said:
Areca : best performance but expensive
3ware : best support but not best performance
Highpoint : mid class for performance and support
Adaptec : software raid on hardware
Promise : runner up. I remember when Promise was the pimp of all SCSI cards

Anyone agree with these ratings or have comments? I know everyone has tried different adapters and some have better luck than others but its great to hear what others have configured and any problems encountered.
 
nicholasfarmer said:
Is there something against using the x16 slot or just considered a waste?
Click to expand...
No, you'll want to use the x16 slot for best performance. I just wasn't sure if you had a SLI / Crossfire setup with both x16 slots full and were looking for a PCIe x1 card.
I already have the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives but if I cannot find a controller within the next 30 days they are going to be returned or sold for something better.
Click to expand...
I still think you should at least consider Dell Perc 5/i or Dell Perc 6/i SAS controllers. You won't get any support, but they offer tremendous bang for the buck. Worst case they're only second in performance to the Areca, but you can get one with 512MB of cache and a BBU for $100 in the classifieds whereas an Areca with a BBU is many times that. There is a massive thread on them here.
 
The Areca SATA cards work just fine with the 1.5TB Seagate drives. Just don't get one of the SAS cards.
 
Not to belabor the point, but this seems relevant since it's the exact setup you're considering. Here's a "ATTO style" IOmeter benchmark of a Dell Perc 5/i with 6 Seagate 7200.11 1.5 TB drives.

 
Stereodude said:
You mean one of the Areca SAS card. Other SAS cards work fine with SATA drives.
Click to expand...
Yes, I was still talking about Areca in general. The Areca SAS cards work fine with many SATA drives, just not the 1.5TB Seagates.
 
Stereodude: If i could award points you would get them all.

The Perc 5/i you used for the benchmark, do you have any special addons with the card?
256meg , battery, etc?

Do you have a model number I could reference?

Thanks for the benchmark numbers!

Unless someone can show higher benchmarks with a different card ill order the Perc 5/i tomorrow.
 
the dell perc6/i supports RAID 6, it is suppost to be slightly slower but still a nice card
 
Have you considered setting up FreeNAS or OpenFiler with your onboard SATA ports and a cheap SATA controller and do software RAID? You lose some functionality you might have with a hardware RAID, but it's cheap, fast and works well. Seems like a decent choice since you already are planning a dedicated box for this.

Also, unless you're planning on 10GbE or multiple trunked GbE links and many clients accessing it at once, your bottleneck is going to be your network. Most solutions (Windows softraid and probably some fakeraid implementations being exceptions) should have no trouble saturating GbE.
 
nicholasfarmer said:
Stereodude: If i could award points you would get them all.

The Perc 5/i you used for the benchmark, do you have any special addons with the card?
256meg , battery, etc?
Click to expand...
It had 256MB and the BBU.
Do you have a model number I could reference?
Click to expand...
Not really. It's just a Perc 5/i Integrated.
Unless someone can show higher benchmarks with a different card ill order the Perc 5/i tomorrow.
Click to expand...
Do NOT buy one new. You can get a used working one with battery, memory, and a PCI bracket for $100.
 
I don't liker perc's because no raid6 support. Anyway I use an ARC-1231ML with 8x1.5 TB (ST31500341AS) drives in raid6 and they work awesomely. Get great read/write performance both over 500 megabytes/sec and so far never had any drives drop out of the array which runs 24/7 in a data center and does random I/O reads at the speed of what the array can do for about 80% of that 24/7 hour period (its under extremely high I/O load). The drives have been been in use for 167 days so far. Works great.
 
nicholasfarmer said:
Unless someone can show higher benchmarks with a different card ill order the Perc 5/i tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Most hardware cards can beat the perc, especially on write speeds (my adaptec 5805 writes at 415MB/s for most of the atto benchmark with a five disk raid 5 on WD re3 1tb disks) but the perc kicks their asses on price/performance.
Plus, as mentioned already the gigabit lan will be the limit and the perc will saturate that without really breaking a sweat.
 
novadude said:
Most hardware cards can beat the perc, especially on write speeds (my adaptec 5805 writes at 415MB/s for most of the atto benchmark with a five disk raid 5 on WD re3 1tb disks) but the perc kicks their asses on price/performance.
Plus, as mentioned already the gigabit lan will be the limit and the perc will saturate that without really breaking a sweat.
Click to expand...
ATTO is largely worthless on cards with large caches because it only write 256MB of data to the card. My graphs are from 165minute long IOmeter runs. The cache does not affect the results I posted.
 
Stereodude said:
ATTO is largely worthless on cards with large caches because it only write 256MB of data to the card. My graphs are from 165minute long IOmeter runs. The cache does not affect the results I posted.
Click to expand...

Some noob would have to uncheck the "Direct I/O" box to have the data cached...

I get the same performance data back no matter which benchmark I run, and I see those numbers in real world applications while moving video streams from a RAID 0 array to the RAID 5.
 
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