Is the Elite 1600 still the best SCSI RAID card?

Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
edited December 2004 in Hardware
Considering that I'm coming up on christmas break here in a few days, I'm going to have a couple weeks to play around with some stuff... I've got something like 15 SCSI hard drives sitting in a drawer at home waiting for a decent RAID controller... I've got some old Compaq 32-bit PCI/64MB cache cards, but they're a pain in the ass to set up and use. So I'm looking for something better... should I pick up an Elite 1600, or is there a better card out there now for <$200?

Comments

  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited December 2004
    What board will it be running in or what speed slot will it be in? If you're putting it in a 64/66MHz slot, then the Elite 1600 is probably your best bang for the buck, as long as it has 128 megs of ram. If you're going to put it in a 64bit/133MHz or PCI-X slot, then a U320 card with PCI-X support like this one here: http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/scsi_320_2x.html
    is the cats a$$! But, if you're not TEX, then you can't afford one!! He's the only guy in the world who can buy a $800.00 card for $3.00 off eBay and have it work perfectly!! ;D;D

    My Elite works flawlessly and has for a couple of years. It has, at any one time, between 6 and 10 drives on it and I can't find a fault with it. And it's fast!! Fool your friends with ATTO's from the cache only!! Enough rambling...

    Flint
  • MediaManMediaMan Powered by loose parts.
    edited December 2004
    I've actually got one of Flintsone's Elite 1600 controllers bought via TEX. It's funny how these things stay in the family.

    Boot up times are a bit slower but good SCSI drives are nice once the system is up. One word of advice..."a bunch of SCSI drives" in a drawer may be slower than one EIDE or SATA. Not all SCSI drives are equal. I have four 9 GB Seagate drives that are as slow as mollases compared to a single EIDE...even if all four drives are RAID 0.

    Best to post the specs of those drives and let the experts like Flintsone and TEX tell you if it's worth it for the drives.

    Hope this helps.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited December 2004
    What board will it be going in?
    *shrug* depends on the mood I'm in when I get around to actually installing the drives... I've got 2 dual P3 boards sitting in a drawer at home, along with a bunch of athlon boards and a couple of P4 boards here at school that i'll probably bring home over christmas break... I might throw it in my dual P3 system... my P4 system... hell, I might throw it in the 466 Celeron. Or it might end up in the K7D. Or the NF7-S. Or I may just go ahead and buy a Tyan Thunder 2500 and stick it in there... so it could be in anything from a 32-bit/33MHz PCI slot to a 64-bit/66MHz slot.

    Mediaman... The drives I've got are mostly old (1999-2001) 9.1GB 10k drives. There are a few 7.2k drives, but not many. They ought to have a sustained transfer rate of around 20MB/s each, at most. Is it worth it? From a practical standpoint, no, but I don't really care... :p I just want something I can screw around with for right now, and which will give me the option of upgrading to newer 10k or 15k U320 drives at some point. So... what I'm looking for is a card that'll be worthwhile using with these new U320 drives that are hitting 80MB/s+, that's still relatively cheap. :p I might go up to $250, but I doubt it... if I could get U320 support with upgradeable cache (to at least 128MB max.), I'd consider it...

    Oh, and as long as the boot times aren't too much worse than my Adaptec 29160 SCSI card, I think I can deal with it. (on a side note... the 29160 is a POS... it's the main reason why I stopped using SCSI a few years ago. It was cheaper to replace the SCSI drives with IDE than it was to get a halfway decent replacement for the 29160 as far as I could tell)
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited December 2004
    NO. It was the one of the fastest of its day though.

    My srcu42x/lsi 320-2x is u320 but also has a processor thats 10 times as fast, handles up to 512mb of onboard ddr not 128mb sdram as cache and is pci-x also.

    With drives of its day the elite 1600 was awesome. As fast as the top drives are today you need to disable the 1600's onboard cache to get decent STR with more then a couple drives. The cpu and memory subsystem isnt fast enough. It still feels very fast in a 64/66 slot for most things but str suffers.

    No matter how many stste of the art drives you put into raid-0 with one AND with the cache enabled you hit like 120 to 140,000 on reads and maybe 90,000 or so on writes on a test like ATTO. The scores are much higher with the cache enabled.

    This is one single older scsi drive on the 320-2x.

    Tex
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited December 2004
    Hmm. Tex, there isn't any chance that that LSI/Intel card is backwards compatible to a 32-bit PCI slot, is there? (yeah I know it'll be a bottleneck, but as a temporary thing, until I have the money to get decent SCSI drives, it'll be fine) :/ What about a 64 bit PCI slot?
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited December 2004
    Won't run in a 5 volt slot. 3 volt only. Doesnt have to be pci-x but has to be 3 volt from my understanding so no its not gonna run in a 32 bit slot. I'm sure you knew that from what I was saying but others might not have.

    Huge cache on a controller like this is actually what makes the older drives feel much much faster. It blurs reality as you don't feel the drives being the bottleneck as the cache handles so much of the flow untill you just hammer it with heavy long term I-O.

    tex
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited December 2004
    :banghead: There any controllers out there that WILL run in a 32-bit slot that are better than the 1600? I may not be able to put the thing in a 64-bit slot for a while, so... :/ :(
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited December 2004
    The old 1500 was better but not worth jacking with in a 32bit slot. You can't take advantage of the speed of even two fast disks. But when one good disk hits 70,000 on a regular controller and your lucky to get above 85,000 or so with two to four in raid whats the point? The bus caps in all practical terms at 100 to 110,000 anyway?

    Your way way better off balancing the i-o manually among two or three drives on a regular u320 controller like the lsi 21320 when you have it in a 32bit slot. I have three 15k fujitsu drives in this amd64 3200 msi-neo that I am typing this on as we speak and they hang off that controller.
    tex
Sign In or Register to comment.