Fastest SATA drives in a large array?
Hello, I'm a speed freak, recently divorced and finding myself full of funds, I'm about to build a monster machine. Currently I'm running a dual Xeon board with 1 2.4 ghz Xeon chip, in researching for a second chip I decided my board has some limitations and I think I'll just get a newer one. So I'm agian going with a supermircro board as I've purchased 3 now (2 for work one for home) and never had any issues out of any of them in over 3 years. Currently I run 2 software raid0 arrays of ultra160 drives and ultra80 drives. Love the SCSI but it has come to my attention that SATA has surpassed U320 speeds even down to the buffer to disk speeds. So in the new monster machine i'm thinking of using 10x100gb sata drives, or as close as possible. I hear good things about the raptor drives and wonder are they really the best? esp in a 10 drive raid0 array? Whats the opinion here?
I'll probably regret going SATA and not waiting for SAS but eh I want it now not in a year when the SAS drives are native and readily available.
Any other tips on a 10 drive array? I realize i'll probably need to spread it across 2 PCI slots to obtain all it can do, maybe even 3. Its all in the air right now though just still making plans not actually buying for a couple of months when i'm completely informed.
I'll probably regret going SATA and not waiting for SAS but eh I want it now not in a year when the SAS drives are native and readily available.
Any other tips on a 10 drive array? I realize i'll probably need to spread it across 2 PCI slots to obtain all it can do, maybe even 3. Its all in the air right now though just still making plans not actually buying for a couple of months when i'm completely informed.
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your 10 drive array is an absolute waste of money. I can accomplish speed and storage capacity for probably half the cost of your raid 10.
It has 128 megs of DDR2 400 on board and supports up to 8 SATA or SAS drives. So i have the option to go SAS later if i want. Also does hardware raid
And please lets not confuse things here I want to do now an 8 drive raid 0 array not a raid 10 array.
Thanks for input people
The fastest sata drives made in the world today are not nearly as fast as the fastest scsi drives. Not in I-O's per second or STR.
Cheers
Tex
I tune high performance disk subsystems for a living so please excuse me.
What MB is this sliding into anyway?
Forgive me for I do not do high end drives for a living, I stay on the high end network side of things someone else can figure out how to try to saturate my links. Now if you guys are done criticizing my idea would you care to suggest something. I know this much i've got a 2.4 ghz Xeon right now that i can't keep busy off a 2 drive raid 0 U160 array, massive archives don't even phase it, processor runs about 10-15% when unzipping 1-4 gig archives, I do lots of handling archives, I do some video editing, I do a decent amount of 3d rendering, and I do a slew of gaming. I see a bottle neck in my current system of a pair of 18 gig U160 drives.
I got my information from seagate presales, I refused to believe that SATA was faster than SCSI but here are some numbers to compare?
SATA
SCSI
If you look at the internal transfer rates the SCSI does win out slightly at 118 MB/s over SATA 95 MB/s and i won't question that the SCSI drive will out spin the SATA drive by years and years. But bang for the buck the sata drive is $150 the SCSI is over $500 about the same size roughly the same and the speed is all of 23 MB/s and this isn't the "best" SATA drive out there but its one of the top end SCSI drives no? slim difference in speed huge difference in cost.
In a raid 0 array each drive adds to the overall speed of the array correct? then an 8 drive array would preform better than a 5 drive array or a 3 drive array? Correct me where ever i may be wrong for agian i'm not a disk drive guru, Thats why i asked the question to begin with.
Welcome to Short-Media.
Now suggestions please.
On a side note, no data redundancy has no importance to me, I keep everything important backed up to DVD anyway and worse case will toss it on my SCSI drives in this computer when i'm done with the new one. I'm looking for shear preformance.
If throughput is your goal, then the way to go would be a PCIe HBA/raid card with the appropriate drives. There is no way I would spend that much money on "old" technology when the bus saturation you're looking for and expecting would be so much better handled by the newest generation of "stuff". Believe me, having followed the speed bug from Ultra2 SCSI on the PCI bus up to U320 on PCIx, it gets expensive when you buy at the tail end of a technology and find yourself drooling over the next step only to find that none of your hardware will make the jump!!
As Tex stated, do a little more research and don't get hardware you'll want to replace within the next 4-6 months. When you start the quest for speed, it can take a serious toll!!!
Flint
no sata drive in the world hits 95,000 for str in real life. The raptors hit over 74,000 I believe on the new ones. The fastest scsi drives actually get close to 100,000.
But in REAL LIFE access time is more important then STR on most things. And that sata drive has an access time of 8 to 9 ms. Raptors are much faster and are below 5 ms. The fast scsi drives are more like 3.5 ms.
And there is no way in the world your going to anywhere near a GB throughput on that array. No way. Not if you spent $ 25,000 on it.
Tex
Tex i appriciate your knowlege in this area, I am thankfull you are responding but all your doing is telling me how wrong i am, thats fine like i said i don't do drives for a living and i won't pretend to know everything about them, agian if i did i wouldn't be here asking the questions. So could you please make a suggestion of the best way to get as much throughput as possible in the price outline i've said. I didn't come here to get flamed I came for answers and you sir in your wisdom that you claim to posess have done nothing but flame me.
You posted that sata drives were faster. And they clearly are not.
If were in your shoes I would approach the problem differantly if speed is really that important. And lets first scale back the total size of the array. Use some sata drives in a smaller array like flinstone is running for large storage. Get 4 of the 250gb hitachi's.
And for serious speed pop over to ebay and get a LSI 320-2e or a Dell Perc4e. They are the same controller. Dell OEM's them from LSI. Then pick up 8 or 10 Maxtor 15k II
scsi drives. These are one of the fastest drives made in the world today period. You can get this stuff on ebay for a fraction of the retail price.
The controller can be scarfed for $250 to $300. I have two of them btw... You can load them down with 512mb cache onboard. They list for $700 to $1000 bucks a pop.
You can get the smaller 36gb maxtor 15k II's for around $100 a pop if your patient. They probably list for $350 new.
So you can nail 8 drives and a controller for maybe a grand. And that setup will eat your sata rig up and spit it out.
Tex
As Flinstone pointed out you want to use pci-e not pci-x. Tons more bandwidth.
That said, I agree with Tex wholeheartedly!! Even if you were to ignore the bus, go PCIx, and get an older U160 SCSI array setup, you'd probably trash the SATA in performance.
Just do a little more research and I'm sure you'll agree.
Flint
Thank you tex i have had some dealings with the dell perc controllers in the past although they were much older i was always impressed with thier speed. I will research this idea further. I'm in no way in love with SATA but just seeking the best out there ATM. Are you suggesting to still go with raid 0 across those 8 SCSI drives. And am i correct in saying with raid 0 more drives = more preformance? I understand only 320 MB/s can go down a single channel so there is a limiter but just the general theory of raid 0?
On the side of PCI-X and PCI-e your right there, this board has 2 8x PCI-e slots so i could use one for controller and one for video. Agian thanks guys I'm digging into that theory right now.
** edit ** scratch that last paragraph i was looking at the wrong board. The one i'm intrested in has 1 16x and 1 4x PCI-e is the 4x still the way to go? I'll need the 16x for video.
also newegg sells one SCSI x8 card:
LSI Logic LSI00008 PCI Express SCSI RAID storage adapter RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816118027
it might be worth your while to protect your data by using an array type with some sort of parity. one of my drives died about a week after i built it and had tons of files on it. and it still ran off of the 3 good drives. just my 2 cents
The perc4e's have a very fast onboard cpu and uses pc2700 ddr. A 4x pci-e has more bandwidth then a pci-x slot. Just make sure it will fit into the 4x slot. Some people are using a exacto knife to cut the back of the slot off or something to make the 8x cards fit.
Tex