SATA vs SCSI RAID 5?

[Gerald]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005, Justin Hopper wrote:

> I not sure about the newer SATA RAID controllers, but I know CPU
> usage was way higher on all SATA RAID controllers than on SCSI RAID
> controllers like those from Adaptec. Good SCSI RAID controllers
> offload a lot of the computation from the host machine onto the card
> itself.

Thanks Justin and Michael (and whomever else replies) for the advice.
After more research and the nice reminder to check for hardware RAID
instead of software RAID I talked the manuf in to making the highpoint a
3ware 9500S-8port for no extra. I'm fairly confident this will keep up
with the load and be a huge storage upgrade.

The new machine will be 6x250 GB RAID 5 on the card above with 4GB RAM
and dual Xeon 3.02 procs. Total for the machine alone is $5500. (Yep 1
terabyte usable for $5500, and how many machines are you still squeezing
the life out of a 9GB drive.) :-)

> If you decide to switch to SATA RAID, myself and probably at least a few
> others would be interested in seeing what difference this makes in CPU
> usage and server load.

With the 3ware card I'm interested to see the CPU usage difference too.
I neglected to mention the upgrade has little to do with the storage
and everything to do with needing more memory that the current MB can
support. The only reason I'm upgrading the storage is the price of this
new stuff is amazing for the performance numbers they are throwing out
and the old RAID system flakes from time to time. That's more an issue
with the SCSI backplane in the current system than the controller or
disks I think though. I didn't want to upgrade to more mem and newer
proc and introduce other issues.

I'm doing MRTG on memory, CPU, LA, and bandwidth presently so I'll
report back after I get approval to purchase it and set it up.

Thanks,

Gerald