Re: Fedora SMP dual core, dual AMD 64 processor system

On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 22:14 -0700, Bill Broadley wrote:
> Er, umm, you mean besides lsi-logic,

The $600 LSI Logic MegaRAID 320-2E, yes, that's the only one.

> promise,

Could you please point out the intelligent, hardware RAID card that
Promise makes for PCIe?  Or do you mean "dumb ATA channels with a 16-bit
only BIOS" (and 100% driver RAID) aka what I call "FRAID" (fake RAID)?

FRAID is not feasible with Linux, it never will be.  It's better to use
the "dumb ATA" channels with MD/LVM.  But I'd much rather have an
intelligent, hardware RAID solution.

> intel,

Product?  Or do you mean the IOP332 XScale microcontroller in use by the
LSI Logic card?  Or another product?

>  SIIG,

Let me guess, High Point Technologies (HPT) or Silicon Image "FRAID"?

> megaraid,

That's LSI Logic.  Don't reuse the product as a vendor.

> tekram,

Product?  Or HPT/SilImage FRAID?

> and friends.

Products?  I've seen a _lot_ of "dumb ATA" channels that do FRAID.
Nothing intelligent.

> You might want to check some obscure places like buy.com, amazon.com, or
> newegg.com

Everything I've seen is FRAID -- "dumb ATA" with 0 intelligence on-
board.  I would be interested if you've found something else though.

> Er, there are plenty of cheap solutions out there, there are pci-e sata
> cards starting at $80 ish with the silicon image chipset on it.

FRAID.  That's _not_ hardware RAID.

> It's fairly easy to buy single socket pci-e motherboards with 8 sata ports for
> under $200.

Yes, and use software RAID.  I want intelligent, hardware RAID.
I've got *1* product choice, the LSI Logic MegaRAID 320-2E.

> Er, I bought a fileserver with one, and the desktop pci-e board I have had 
> for 6 months or so has 8 sata ports.  All the big popular hardware
> distributors seem to have pci-e raid cards.

I want intelligent, hardware RAID in PCIe.  I know only 1 product.
If you know more, please tell me.  But don't tell me about FRAID.

> Yeah, definitely although many of the hardware raid cards can't manage
> faster than legacy PCI bandwidth anyways.

Then you've never used a 3Ware Escalade 7000/8000 64-bit ASIC product or
an LSI Logic MegaRAID "X" series Intel XScale microcontroller product.

Besides, pushing _all_ I/O over a _single_, _shared_, _legacy_ was _not_
viable back in 2000, let alone now (5 years later).

I used to specialize in ripping out i440BX/GX chipset mainboards and
putting in ServerWorks ServerSet IIILE and IIIHE chipset mainboards for
$500-750 and companies would instantly see 3x the performance with their
_existing_ RAID controllers and GbE cards.  And that was circa 2000.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     [email protected]     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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