Dependable SCSI RAID Controllers for Linux? 63
"I have been considering ICP Vortex RZ and RS series and AMI Megaraid as possibles, along with the Mylex line of controllers. I would like some opinions, praises and even nightmare stories on any of these. I am not wanting to invest $350-$1500 per controller on another nightmare like Adaptec/DPT line. It should be obvious but cost is not primary, reliability and to a lesser degree performance are the key issues. In addition I run my controllers in RAID 5 with a hot spare, so suggestions should be for controllers that can do that RAID mode and ones that can be administered from a running Linux system so I can do hot swapping. I would also like controllers whose manufacturer keeps current patches available for the stock kernel tree or is in the kernel tree (for both 2.2 and 2.4, I use 2.2 mostly due to issues with 2.4) as I never use a canned kernel after the install is done. If you run Windows or some other truthfully Adaptec supported OS look for a few *good* DPT or Adaptec controllers on eBay when the swap-out is all over."
It really depends on what you're doing... (Score:2, Insightful)
On one of our production servers we have twin 18 Gig 10krpm Ultrawide SCSI drives for the database, and a pai rof 80 Gig IDE drives for the static data like web content.
The pair of U2W SCSI drives in a RAID1 can be read at about 48 Megs a second by bonnie, while the pair of 80 gig IDEs can be read at about 28 Megs a second.
pgbench, a little benchmarking program for postgresql, gets about 150 to 200 transactions per second on the dual SCSI drives, while it gets about 100 to 120 on the dual IDE drives.
the problem is, even under it's heaviest loads, that machine never handles more than 10 or 20 transactions every second. Both sets of drives are plenty fast enough to hand the load.
For servers that need hundreds of gigabytes of storage but only have to provide static storage for a medium, to small group, the money you'd spend on SCSI is probably better spent on other options for that server.
For a database server handling hundreds of concurrent users, SCSI (via electrical cables) is a good choice, but maybe a SCSI over FC-AL setup would be needed.
Engineering isn't about which component is the absolute best, it's about which component makes the most sense for what you're doing.