gamesfairy (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gamesfairy) wrote,@ 2008-09-02 17:39:00 |
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Yesterday, I decided to set up my SCSI disk subsystem in my main machine again, retiring the old SATA disk I threw in there as a 'temporary measure' which ended up being fairly permanent.
My setup consists of two 18GB, u320, 15k spindle speed drives, and a newly-purchased PERC4 pci-express RAID controller. IMO, it is worth sacrificing the insanely-fast seek time of a single 15k drive for the slightly-slower-but-still-very-fast seek time of a striped array of two 15k drives.
Unfortunately, there are a few issues with this idea.
Firstly, the PERC4 simply doesn't work in my board, or my other pci-express board. Googling about, it seems that these cards are pretty picky, and some people claim that the best way to make them work is to place them in a dell machine, and flash them to the firmware of the LSI megaraid 320-2X, which is apparently the same hardware. I don't have any new dell hardware, but a friend of mine does (thanks Mat!) who has offered to flash the firmware for me, but I'm wondering if I'm happy with depending on such a flaky piece of hardware.
Secondly, one of my 18GB 15k drives has died a death, so at the very least, I'd have to replace it with another 18. I'd be happier buying a single 36 (or even 72) since they've come down in price now, and keeping everything on one disk will give me slightly faster seek times (albeit at the cost of slightly less throughput).
These two things make me very tempted to switch to a totally different subsystem. The way I see it, I've got a few options:
* Hope PERC4 runs in PICE, buy bigger 15k SCSI disk (or possibly two and mirror them).
* Fish in my spares box, pull out a PCIX (not pcie) fakeraid card, set up single drive or striped array, and just live with the PCI bottleneck (at 32/33mhz=133mb/sec).
* Attach an enthusiast-level drive to the onboard SATA controller. This looks like a Raptor or the like, which are apparently blazing drives, despite ahving only a 10k spindle speed. The onboard controller won't do any caching, though, being a weedy little thing, although it should be pretty fast to talk to the rest of the system.
* Sell the PERC4, and buy an PERC5 SAS controller. Whack 512MB or so RAM in it, attach some server-grade super ultra mega fast drives (I'm thinking if the Savvio 2.5" drives) and do it properly.
* Sell the PERC4, say 'screw it', and buy a 32GB SSD. Don't bother with an expensive controller, since it's so stupidly fast to transfer data that caching it isn't as big an issue. Consider buying a proper controller later, when I'm rich, to avoid any CPU hit from my onboard SATA hardware.
My main areas of interest are c# development (compiling from VS, Intellisense, etc) and FPGA synthesis using Xilinx ISE. I think the faster seek time and big cache of a 'proper' controller will really benefit me when I do FPGA stuff.
Any storage gurus reading this blog want to comment?
My setup consists of two 18GB, u320, 15k spindle speed drives, and a newly-purchased PERC4 pci-express RAID controller. IMO, it is worth sacrificing the insanely-fast seek time of a single 15k drive for the slightly-slower-but-still-very-fast seek time of a striped array of two 15k drives.
Unfortunately, there are a few issues with this idea.
Firstly, the PERC4 simply doesn't work in my board, or my other pci-express board. Googling about, it seems that these cards are pretty picky, and some people claim that the best way to make them work is to place them in a dell machine, and flash them to the firmware of the LSI megaraid 320-2X, which is apparently the same hardware. I don't have any new dell hardware, but a friend of mine does (thanks Mat!) who has offered to flash the firmware for me, but I'm wondering if I'm happy with depending on such a flaky piece of hardware.
Secondly, one of my 18GB 15k drives has died a death, so at the very least, I'd have to replace it with another 18. I'd be happier buying a single 36 (or even 72) since they've come down in price now, and keeping everything on one disk will give me slightly faster seek times (albeit at the cost of slightly less throughput).
These two things make me very tempted to switch to a totally different subsystem. The way I see it, I've got a few options:
* Hope PERC4 runs in PICE, buy bigger 15k SCSI disk (or possibly two and mirror them).
* Fish in my spares box, pull out a PCIX (not pcie) fakeraid card, set up single drive or striped array, and just live with the PCI bottleneck (at 32/33mhz=133mb/sec).
* Attach an enthusiast-level drive to the onboard SATA controller. This looks like a Raptor or the like, which are apparently blazing drives, despite ahving only a 10k spindle speed. The onboard controller won't do any caching, though, being a weedy little thing, although it should be pretty fast to talk to the rest of the system.
* Sell the PERC4, and buy an PERC5 SAS controller. Whack 512MB or so RAM in it, attach some server-grade super ultra mega fast drives (I'm thinking if the Savvio 2.5" drives) and do it properly.
* Sell the PERC4, say 'screw it', and buy a 32GB SSD. Don't bother with an expensive controller, since it's so stupidly fast to transfer data that caching it isn't as big an issue. Consider buying a proper controller later, when I'm rich, to avoid any CPU hit from my onboard SATA hardware.
My main areas of interest are c# development (compiling from VS, Intellisense, etc) and FPGA synthesis using Xilinx ISE. I think the faster seek time and big cache of a 'proper' controller will really benefit me when I do FPGA stuff.
Any storage gurus reading this blog want to comment?
