Archive for December, 2011

We have our hands on four SAS 6 Gb / s RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, HighPoint and LSI, and they went with RAID 0, 5, 6 and 10 workloads to test their courage. If your system connectivity, eight more ports? We answer that!

Check out motherboards today (or even some of the older platforms out there). Is it really still buy a dedicated RAID controller? Three-gigabit SATA ports are found on almost every card, and audio and network connectivity. The latest chipsets like Intel’s and AMD’s A75 Z68 even integrate support SATA 6 Gb / s. Based on a reliable power electronics, a powerful processor and many I / O, you’re not all characteristics of a solid add-in card? Where it makes sense to invest in a discrete control it?

In most cases, mainstream users to create RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays configured with its built-in motherboard SATA ports and a little bit of software allows reasonable performance. But in an environment where there are more advanced RAID levels, such as 6, 50 or 60 required, beefier drive control is desired, or scalability is required, the chipset-based controls are inadequate. That’s when it’s time for a professional-class solution.

And at this point, you’re no longer limited to SATA storage. To facilitate a large number of add-in cards that enable support for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC) disk drives, each interface offers unique advantages.

SAS and FC RAID for professional

Each of the three available interfaces (SATA, SAS and FC) brings different strengths and weaknesses of the table, none of them can be called in any case as the best. The strengths of the SATA drives on some of the largest capacity and low cost, while the management of large data rates. SAS drives are typically emphasize the reliability, scalability and high I / O rates. FC storage is focused on continuous, high data rates. As a legacy solution, some companies are still using Ultra SCSI, although with a maximum unit count of 16 (including a controller and up to 15 discs) disabled. In addition, the maximum total bandwidth of 320 MB / s (in the case of the Ultra-320 SCSI) rather poorly in comparison to its successors.

Ultra SCSI uses the standard for professional, enterprise storage solutions. SAS is largely over who have not only a much larger bandwidth, but also the flexibility of mixed SAS / SATA environments for cost, performance, reliability and the ability to really optimize within a JBOD. Moreover, many dual-ported SAS drives for the purpose of redundancy. If a controller card expires, you close the drive to a second controller failover. This allows SAS support for high availability setups.

In addition, SAS is not only a point-to-point protocol between a controller and a memory device. It supports up to 255 memory devices via SAS expanders on cable. By using a two-tier structure, SAS expander, theoretically, 255 x 255 (or slightly more than 65,000) storage devices can be connected to a SAS channel, provided that the controller chip has such a large amount of support.

Adaptec, Areca, HighPoint and LSI: Four tested SAS RAID Controller

In this comparison, we examine the performance of the current SAS RAID Controller, represented by four products: Adaptec RAID 6805, Areca ARC-1880i, HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL attack, and the LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i.

SAS and FC-why not? On the one hand, SAS is more relevant and interesting architecture. It offers features such as zoning, which can be very attractive for professional use. On the other side of the market data shows that the FC role in professional storage market is declining, and some analysts even predict their demise based on the number of distribution disks. While the future looks bleak for the FC, IDC predicts SAS drives 72 percent share of the enterprise HDD market in 2014 to enforce.