Decent Dell RAID card for 4x300GB disks in a Dell r410

Y

yatesco

Renowned Member
Sep 25, 2009
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Hi all,

Anyone know of a decent RAID card for 4x300GB disks in a Dell R410? Preferably RAID 10?

I have an SAS6/I thing (SAS1068E) with no battery backed cache and RAID 0 gets a couple of hundred FSYNCS a second :(

Any recommendations? It has to be dell supplied...

Thanks,

Col
 
PERC 6 and older PERC 5 should be safe choices. Not a long time ago Dell launched a new series of raid controllers (PERC H200, H700, H800), but I now nothing about drivers & compatibility of those..
Perc 6 & 5 can both do RAID10 and have BBU.

- Mikael
 
Hi Mikael,

Do you have pveperf performance results for any of these cards? I intend to run some pretty IO intensive (i.e. Database) virtual machines on 4 x 300GB SAS 15K disks and I don't want the RAID card to be the bottleneck (as it currently is it seems).

Thanks
 
Yes, but all of those cards are installed in production servers (mostly Dell PE2900 series) and they are constantly under heavy load. So current pveperf results would be distorted and wouldn't be very helpful. I did some tests a way back then but I can't remember exact figures. At least I can say that I've been very satisfied with the I/O throughput.

But a brand new Dell R710 should be here at the end of this month, so I can post some clean results later if you want to. The server is equipped with 6x300GB SAS15k + PERC6i Raid10
 
even distorted figures would be good as a "will be better than " reading if possible?

I realise messing with prof isn't a good idea though :)
 
Ok, I'll post some reference results tomorrow from the office and try to avoid any catastrophes :)
 
Hi!

As commented in this thread, it is a little difficult to get clean results from servers that are in use. Anyway, from a PERC6/i with 4x 300GB SAS 15k in RAID 10 I got:

CPU BOGOMIPS: 39903.65
REGEX/SECOND: 472006
HD SIZE: 94.49 GB (/dev/pve/root)
BUFFERED READS: 207.27 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 4.94 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 2870.18
DNS EXT: 100.34 ms
DNS INT: 128.54 ms (xxx.com)

as the best result, out of a few tests. I have been very pleased so far.

Cheers,

Joe
 
I have a cluster of two servers with the same disk-layout, but PERC5/i instead. These servers don't seem as responsive as the ones with PERC6/i, when under no load at all, but that's just a hunch. Currently the PERC5s are under very heavy load so comparing results makes no sense.
 
Hi,

Here some pveperf tests against data partition

From PERC5/i, 4x146GB SAS15k RAID10
CPU BOGOMIPS: 31937.36
REGEX/SECOND: 440510
HD SIZE: 256.90 GB (/dev/mapper/pve-data)
BUFFERED READS: 183.88 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 6.47 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 1594.57

From PERC5/i, 6x146GB SAS15k RAID50
CPU BOGOMIPS: 31936.88
REGEX/SECOND: 402033
HD SIZE: 516.76 GB (/dev/mapper/pve-data)
BUFFERED READS: 86.94 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 9.48 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 834.68

As I said before these servers are under load and run some very I/O intensive environments (inc. Oracle & SQLServer database servers) so "clean" tests undoubtedly would had given a way better results. Anyway the number of fsyncs is still tolerable.
 
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