Topic: IDE Raid 5 SME 5.x

[Derek]

Hi,

Has anybody had any success using IDE Raid Cards like the 3Ware Escalade 7410 to set up SME 5.x with Raid-5?

I'm replacing a Lotus Domino Server with SME and would like to use the same box.

TIA,

Derek

[Dan Brown]

AFAIK, e-smith/SME supports the 3ware controllers out of the box.  It wouldn't matter what kind of array you have set up, as the array will appear to the system as a single drive.  No first-hand experience here, but it sure seems like it should work.

[aniston]

hello,

I am using the 3ware 7410  H/W RAID IDE controller with 2 disks in RAID 1 without any problems. to install it is a breeze during ithe first screen where e-smith asks you to key in "accept" just key in "accept dd" and supply the 3ware driver disk supplied for RH it will find the card without any problem.

however i did not find much difference even though i used a 64 bit slot features (using a 64 PCI motherboard) between another test on standard 2 disks in RAID 1 via S/W linux standard on normal e-smith installations. to be precise the transfer is better if you use  a good pack of 5 or more disks on the simillar family of controllers like its big brother the 7810 which can handle upto 8 disks in RAID 5 feature. because the card actually offers good BUS I/O performance while the standard ATA100 EIDE disks cannot actually break the physical 40MB/s platter/head to CPU I/O or even DMA I/O. what all that means is that unless you had a array of inexpensive disks like the real terminology of RAID (something like 5 or more) then only would you benefit from higher I/O of the controller considering its 198MB/s I/O form the IDE interface to the PCI bus !!

heres a view of 3 diff servers all in RAID 1 the second one is is with 3ware 7410
standard settings are 256MB SDRAM PC133
a PIII 1GHZ or AMD Duron 1GHZ
2 Quantum disks of 40GB ATA 100 EIDE on seperate channels (taken out the cd rom after installation)
1 network card of 3Com 100Mbps

[root@server /root]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda (PIII with intel 815 chipset)
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  1.32 seconds = 96.97 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.89 seconds = 33.86 MB/sec

[root@server2 /root]# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda (PIII with serverworks 64bit PCI chipset)
/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.73 seconds =175.34 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.61 seconds = 39.75 MB/sec

[root@server3 /root]# hdparm -Tt /dev/hda (VIA chipset VT 82C586 Apollo IDE)
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.87 seconds =147.13 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.95 seconds = 32.82 MB/sec

notice that the AMD DURON with the VIA chipset gives a very good performance (i have shown an approximate value taken form looking at 10 samples in sequence every time as described in the hdparm text)

let me know how yours performs eventually.
regards,
aniston.

[Derek]

Thanks for the info, I will definitely let you know how it performs when I get it up and running.

Have you tried using 3 or more disks RAID 5 with your 7410 and SME? Also, how about array monitoring. Is that possible with SME?

Regards,

Derek

[Derek]

How about the Promise SX600? Anybody tried that card?

[Paul van Dun]

I've E-mailed the people in the Netherlands if we can borrow one or two cards from them to make a Dutch HowTo for our own unofficial E-smith forum (the largest in the Netherlands with an average of 2000-2500 unique hits every month).
But their E-mail adress doesn't work so we can't reach them, As i've read the 3ware 7410 is supported be 4.12 thru 5.1 or not.
Is this card expensive or is it a cheap one like the Highpoint HPT370A card ???


Best regards,

Paul van Dun
http://www.minddigger.com

[Edward]

I got the Escalade to work without problems.  
$150-$300 check pricewatch.com.

By the way, has anyone get the monitoring program to work with the escalade?

Thanks,
edward