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Which Combination Is Faster?
Your opinions please!
Which is faster: (6) U320 15K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-X controller. or (6) SATA-300 10K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-E controller. Based on my understanding of the bottlenecks, I would tend to think the 10K SATA array on the PCI-E controller would be faster than the 15K SCSI array on the PCI-X controller. Your thoughts? |
#2
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Which Combination Is Faster?
"Eric Robinson" wrote in message
... Your opinions please! Which is faster: (6) U320 15K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-X controller. or (6) SATA-300 10K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-E controller. Based on my understanding of the bottlenecks, I would tend to think the 10K SATA array on the PCI-E controller would be faster than the 15K SCSI array on the PCI-X controller. Your thoughts? As always, it depends. Is your application bandwidth or access time constrained? If you want to run a constant stream of data to/from the RAID set then you may be right and SATA with PCI-E may be best. If you have a heavy database on it with many simultaneous queries then the SCSI disks may be faster due to better seek time and lower rotational latency. Rob |
#3
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Which Combination Is Faster?
That's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for, thanks.
"Rob Turk" wrote in message news:7bDng.2718$YI3.1555@amstwist00... "Eric Robinson" wrote in message ... Your opinions please! Which is faster: (6) U320 15K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-X controller. or (6) SATA-300 10K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-E controller. Based on my understanding of the bottlenecks, I would tend to think the 10K SATA array on the PCI-E controller would be faster than the 15K SCSI array on the PCI-X controller. Your thoughts? As always, it depends. Is your application bandwidth or access time constrained? If you want to run a constant stream of data to/from the RAID set then you may be right and SATA with PCI-E may be best. If you have a heavy database on it with many simultaneous queries then the SCSI disks may be faster due to better seek time and lower rotational latency. Rob |
#4
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Which Combination Is Faster?
Rob Turk wrote:
"Eric Robinson" wrote in message ... Your opinions please! Which is faster: (6) U320 15K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-X controller. or (6) SATA-300 10K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-E controller. Based on my understanding of the bottlenecks, I would tend to think the 10K SATA array on the PCI-E controller would be faster than the 15K SCSI array on the PCI-X controller. As always, it depends. Is your application bandwidth or access time constrained? If you want to run a constant stream of data to/from the RAID set then you may be right and SATA with PCI-E may be best. If you have a heavy database on it with many simultaneous queries then the SCSI disks may be faster due to better seek time and lower rotational latency. And details matter a lot, many of which isn't in the original post, but as a first stab it's a good summary. Assuming current disks, using figures from Seagate for 15k disk (Cheetah 15k5, but the older 15k4 is very similar). The problem starts with the "SATA-300 10K", the only SATA 10k drive I know of is the WD Raptor, which WD says is SATA-150 :-) Not that I expect that to actually MATTER, so lets use the latest WD Raptor here. At one extreme a small random load (high IOPS, very smaller IO, totally random) the 6x15k array is likely to be able to handle between 30% (avg. seek, it used to be larger) and 50% more (rotational speed/latency) random ops. The other extreme is streaming data, where I expected the 10k drives to be as fast or faster (higher spindle speed but lower density). However, Seagate properly lists both low and high sustained external transfer, but WD only lists a single value. The question is WHAT WD is listing, it could be the lowest figure, the average over the entire disk or the peak... WD's figure is about 15% higher than Seagate "low" value and 67% of their "high" value. Seagate 15k5, 6x15k - 6x73-125MB/s - 438-750MB/s WD Raptor (150GB/16MB), 6x10k - 6x84MB/s - 504MB/s (but where!?) All this is of course assuming enough SCSI channels that *they* don't get satured first! SATA is less likely to hit this, but there ARE "port multiplication" features for SATA... :-) It also assumes that the controller and/or the machine is capable of handling these kind of bandwiths, which may or may not be the case :-) Since PCI-E cards is in general newer they may fare slightly better here (though RAID-10 is usually less affected than RAID5), on the other hand PCI-X has long been pushed as a server solution and some of the PCI-E cards are based on their PCI-X cousins. We also need to figure out what PCI-X is in this case, the smallest version is 64/66 with a theoretical speed of 528 MB/s. Getting above 450 MB/s on it is likely to be hard, so it could push the 6x15k's top speed below that of the 6x10k (though it would be faster over almost all of the disk). But it's fairly common to have multiple 100MHz or 133MHz PCI-X slots in a server (with 798MB/s and 1064MB/s theoretical speed), significantly above that of the 6x10k array above (There's also PCI-X 2.0 for faster speeds). When it comes to PCI-E, how fast it is depends on the number of lanes and it's also different in that it provides a set amount of bandwidth in both directions instead of the shared model used by PCI/PCI-X. Each PCI-E lane has a raw capacity of 238MB/s in each direction, so for mostly unidirectional traffic you'd need 2 lanes to match the slowest PCI-X interface (more balance traffic fares better). So, a low-end PCI-E SATA controller (1x) would have less bandwidth available, but I don't think it's likely you'll find one with 6 or more SATA ports. 4x or 8x seems more likely and even in the worst case scenario the 4x should have more bandwidth available than 133/64 PCI-X. However, you might be able to do it with two 4-port PCI-E SATA cards, which IS likely to be 1x cards (I'm ignoring those nearly mythical port multipliers until I've actually seen them and they worked!). My best guess is that the PCI-X/6x15k array is probably going to be significantly faster in IOPS, but in the transfer rate test it would depend on details such as exact disk models used and how fast the "PCI-X" is :-) (and assuming the PCI-E "controller" isn't two 1x models) To some extent it's probably better to compare not a set number of disks but performance against some OTHER metric, such as cost or power usage! OTOH then Raptor's isn't exactly known for being cheap, and the cost would have to include all other elements (support, chassi and so on) which makes it very hard to make a fair comparison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-Express |
#5
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Which Combination Is Faster?
Thanks for your thoughtful and detailed reply. Good information.
For what it's worth, this benchmark article addressed the question to my satisfaction. Other people might also find it helpful. http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/...s_battles_pci/ "Torbjorn Lindgren" wrote in message .. . Rob Turk wrote: "Eric Robinson" wrote in message ... Your opinions please! Which is faster: (6) U320 15K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-X controller. or (6) SATA-300 10K drives in a RAID 10 array, attached to a PCI-E controller. Based on my understanding of the bottlenecks, I would tend to think the 10K SATA array on the PCI-E controller would be faster than the 15K SCSI array on the PCI-X controller. As always, it depends. Is your application bandwidth or access time constrained? If you want to run a constant stream of data to/from the RAID set then you may be right and SATA with PCI-E may be best. If you have a heavy database on it with many simultaneous queries then the SCSI disks may be faster due to better seek time and lower rotational latency. And details matter a lot, many of which isn't in the original post, but as a first stab it's a good summary. Assuming current disks, using figures from Seagate for 15k disk (Cheetah 15k5, but the older 15k4 is very similar). The problem starts with the "SATA-300 10K", the only SATA 10k drive I know of is the WD Raptor, which WD says is SATA-150 :-) Not that I expect that to actually MATTER, so lets use the latest WD Raptor here. At one extreme a small random load (high IOPS, very smaller IO, totally random) the 6x15k array is likely to be able to handle between 30% (avg. seek, it used to be larger) and 50% more (rotational speed/latency) random ops. The other extreme is streaming data, where I expected the 10k drives to be as fast or faster (higher spindle speed but lower density). However, Seagate properly lists both low and high sustained external transfer, but WD only lists a single value. The question is WHAT WD is listing, it could be the lowest figure, the average over the entire disk or the peak... WD's figure is about 15% higher than Seagate "low" value and 67% of their "high" value. Seagate 15k5, 6x15k - 6x73-125MB/s - 438-750MB/s WD Raptor (150GB/16MB), 6x10k - 6x84MB/s - 504MB/s (but where!?) All this is of course assuming enough SCSI channels that *they* don't get satured first! SATA is less likely to hit this, but there ARE "port multiplication" features for SATA... :-) It also assumes that the controller and/or the machine is capable of handling these kind of bandwiths, which may or may not be the case :-) Since PCI-E cards is in general newer they may fare slightly better here (though RAID-10 is usually less affected than RAID5), on the other hand PCI-X has long been pushed as a server solution and some of the PCI-E cards are based on their PCI-X cousins. We also need to figure out what PCI-X is in this case, the smallest version is 64/66 with a theoretical speed of 528 MB/s. Getting above 450 MB/s on it is likely to be hard, so it could push the 6x15k's top speed below that of the 6x10k (though it would be faster over almost all of the disk). But it's fairly common to have multiple 100MHz or 133MHz PCI-X slots in a server (with 798MB/s and 1064MB/s theoretical speed), significantly above that of the 6x10k array above (There's also PCI-X 2.0 for faster speeds). When it comes to PCI-E, how fast it is depends on the number of lanes and it's also different in that it provides a set amount of bandwidth in both directions instead of the shared model used by PCI/PCI-X. Each PCI-E lane has a raw capacity of 238MB/s in each direction, so for mostly unidirectional traffic you'd need 2 lanes to match the slowest PCI-X interface (more balance traffic fares better). So, a low-end PCI-E SATA controller (1x) would have less bandwidth available, but I don't think it's likely you'll find one with 6 or more SATA ports. 4x or 8x seems more likely and even in the worst case scenario the 4x should have more bandwidth available than 133/64 PCI-X. However, you might be able to do it with two 4-port PCI-E SATA cards, which IS likely to be 1x cards (I'm ignoring those nearly mythical port multipliers until I've actually seen them and they worked!). My best guess is that the PCI-X/6x15k array is probably going to be significantly faster in IOPS, but in the transfer rate test it would depend on details such as exact disk models used and how fast the "PCI-X" is :-) (and assuming the PCI-E "controller" isn't two 1x models) To some extent it's probably better to compare not a set number of disks but performance against some OTHER metric, such as cost or power usage! OTOH then Raptor's isn't exactly known for being cheap, and the cost would have to include all other elements (support, chassi and so on) which makes it very hard to make a fair comparison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-Express |
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