Re: Advice on RAID card

It looks like a rebranded low end Adaptec 64MB PCI-X <-> SATA RAID card.
Looks like the 64MB buffer is not upgradable.
Looks like it's SATA, not SATA II

There are much better ways to spend your money.

These are the products with the current best price/performance ratio:
http://www.areca.us/products/html/pcix-sata.htm

Assuming you are not building 1U boxes, get one of the full height
cards and order it with the maximum size buffer you can afford.
The cards take 1 SODIMM, so that will be a max of 1GB or 2GB
depending on whether 2GB SODIMMs are available to you yet.

Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: PFC <lists(at)boutiquenumerique(dot)com>
Sent: Sep 24, 2005 4:34 AM
To: pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [PERFORM] Advice on RAID card

Hello fellow Postgresql'ers.

I've been stumbled on this RAID card which looks nice. It is a PCI-X SATA
Raid card with 6 channels, and does RAID 0,1,5,10,50.
It is a HP card with an Adaptec chip on it, and 64 MB cache.

HP Part # : 372953-B21
Adaptec Part # : AAR-2610SA/64MB/HP

There' even a picture :
http://megbytes.free.fr/Sata/DSC05970.JPG

I know it isn't as good as a full SCSI system. I just want to know if
some of you have had experiences with these, and if this cards belong to
the "slower than no RAID" camp, like some DELL card we often see mentioned
here, or to the "decent performance for the price" camp. It is to run on a
Linux.

Thanks in advance for your time and information.

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> It looks like a rebranded low end Adaptec 64MB PCI-X <-> SATA RAID card.
> Looks like the 64MB buffer is not upgradable.
> Looks like it's SATA, not SATA II

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I can get one for 150 Euro, the Areca is
at least 600. This is for a budget server so while it would be nice to
have all the high-tech stuff, it's not the point. My question was raher,
is it one of the crap RAID5 cards which are actually SLOWER than plain IDE
disks, or is it decent, even though low-end (and cheap), and worth it
compared to software RAID5 ?

> Assuming you are not building 1U boxes, get one of the full height
> cards and order it with the maximum size buffer you can afford.
> The cards take 1 SODIMM, so that will be a max of 1GB or 2GB
> depending on whether 2GB SODIMMs are available to you yet.

It's for a budget dev server which should have RAID5 for reliability, but
not necessarily stellar performance (and price). I asked about this card
because I can get one at a good price.

Thanks for taking the time to answer.