What am I doing wrong ??? Or is Adaptec 21610SA just a crappy RAID card ?

Hi All,

Sorry to jump in on this thread.

I've been following this thread here for a number of reasons, but I
wonder if this might not be a problem with the Adaptec adapter?

The main reason that I was interested was that I was doing some drive
benchmarking awhile ago on some Dell 6650 servers which used Adaptec
SCSI adapter, and was getting pretty miserable results. During that
testing, I ran across this:

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Forums...opic.php?t=182

Note the post from "JA DEVELOPMENTS". The first time I saw that, I kind
of put it off as a rant, but like I said, I think that I kind of ran
into this with the Dells (and I ran these tests with a number of
different Dell servers).

Jim

"Rita Ä Berkowitz" skrev i en meddelelse
...
news.tele.dk wrote:

You will be. SATA is all about novelty and hype. You get impressive
specs
of storage and speed that costs pennies waved under your nose and you get
hooked. When you start putting it together and fall into the trap of lack
of reliability is when wish you never got involved with it. Believe me,
there are alot of people that bought into the hype and have since went
back
to SCSI. It was a costly lesson.

Yes it cost pennies, in Danish currency:

Maxtor Atlas 10K 146Gb = 3760,78
Maxtor DiamondMax 160Gb = 606,80

So what youre saying is: "The speed of SCSI disks is more than 6 times that
of SATA".
Eg. when we buy an array of disk with 2 SCSI disks it will match our SATA
array
with 12 disks (when we eventually get hold of a recent controller).


best regards,
Carsten

news.tele.dk wrote:

"Rita Ä Berkowitz" skrev i en meddelelse
...
news.tele.dk wrote:

You will be. SATA is all about novelty and hype. You get impressive
specs
of storage and speed that costs pennies waved under your nose and you get
hooked. When you start putting it together and fall into the trap of
lack
of reliability is when wish you never got involved with it. Believe me,
there are alot of people that bought into the hype and have since went
back
to SCSI. It was a costly lesson.

One would like to know how many constitute "a lot" and a few names, but Rita
never has that.

Yes it cost pennies, in Danish currency:

Maxtor Atlas 10K 146Gb = 3760,78
Maxtor DiamondMax 160Gb = 606,80

So what youre saying is: "The speed of SCSI disks is more than 6 times
that of SATA".
Eg. when we buy an array of disk with 2 SCSI disks it will match our SATA
array
with 12 disks (when we eventually get hold of a recent controller).

Ignore Rita--the only tool she knows is SCSI so to her it's the perfect
solution to all problems including those for which it is totally
inappropriate. She's your basic troll. A fairly effective one I'll grant
her but she admits that she "plays" people rather than engaging in debate
over the actual merits of the technology.

However, that said, with enterprise storage you want all the speed you can
get but not at the cost of reliability. When the downtime to swap out a
drive can cost tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, the price
difference between an SATA and a SCSI drive is inconsequential if it saves
one outage over the course of a decade or so.

The only SATA drives that are designed specifically for enterprise storage
are the Western Digital Raptors. The Maxtor Maxlines are intended for
non-mission-critical servers. The Diamondmax you priced above is aimed at
desktop use and may or may not hold up in a heavily used server, but it's
best to assume it won't until proven otherwise.

best regards,
Carsten

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

Wasn't she the one that gracefully let you make an asshole out of yourself
in public when she called you to task for your spouting of misinformation?
As I remember, you were the one that claimed SATA superiority over SCSI.
Why the sudden change of heart? You have been proven wrong numerous times
by other members of this group who posted links to debunk your empty claims.
Even Rod embarrassed you.


"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...

Ignore Rita--the only tool she knows is SCSI so to her it's the perfect
solution to all problems including those for which it is totally
inappropriate. She's your basic troll. A fairly effective one I'll grant
her but she admits that she "plays" people rather than engaging in debate
over the actual merits of the technology.

On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 19:08:41 -0500, "J. Clarke"
wrote:


All else being equal, SATA single drives seem to come pretty close to the
performance level of SCSI drives. But a high-end SATA drive is an
entry-level SCSI drive. Maybe that will change eventually. Right now SATA
has a way to go before it becomes a viable substitute even for PATA, let
alone SCSI.

[ Snip ]

Whoever told you that Adaptec was "top of the line" is an idiot. Adaptec
RAID controllers have never worked particularly well and their ATA RAID
controllers even less so. See what IBM uses in their servers--you'll find
that it's Mylex, which IBM spun off to LSI Logic a while back. LSI Logic
has a nice family of SATA RAID controllers that might be worth a look. You
could also look at 3Ware, which specializes in SATA RAID. Since you're
using an Intel server board, an Intel RAID controller (designs are similar
but not identical to LSI IIRC) might be another viable option.

I concur with this. In particular, having built large RAID systems
for a living, I'll state that it is utterly irrelevant to the consumer
what the back-end interface is. You should not care if the disks are
P-ATA, S-ATA, SAS, Parallel SCSI, Fibre Channel, or even good old SSA!

[ Actually, I could make a good argument that of those, Parallel SCSI
is possibly the worst choice architecturally, due to the shared bus
making it possible for a failing drive to influence it's neighbors,
which is not nice, plus the limited options when throwing resets
around: if you want to reset one drive, you can try and send it a
reset message, but if it doesn't respond, you have to whack the bus
and reset all the others on that bus. Against which, the mainstream
SCSI devices -- Parallel and Fibre Channel, which is just as much SCSI
and Parallel SCSI is -- tend to be higher performance, have more
sophisticated feature sets, and have higher reliability goals and
specs. Bottom line is that, today, FC is the "price-no-object" winner
]

Granted, some of those offer features that others don't, but in
reality the only one you care about is command tagged queueing. If a
disk implements CTQ at all (and the RAID controller uses it), you're
set.

To the original poster, I'd point out the existence of several
FibreChannel-to-SATA RAID systems that perform very nicely at their
price point, so SATA isn't the problem. And Adaptec's RAID offerings
have been notoriously, umm, low-end. AFAICT, they are positioned
against the Promise thingies, which are so low-end that they don't
actually do anything in hardware!

I've heard good things about 3Ware's SATA solutions, so I'd be
interested in the results of you trying those.

Malc.

news.tele.dk wrote:

Yes it cost pennies, in Danish currency:

Maxtor Atlas 10K 146Gb = 3760,78
Maxtor DiamondMax 160Gb = 606,80

So what youre saying is: "The speed of SCSI disks is more than 6
times that of SATA".
Eg. when we buy an array of disk with 2 SCSI disks it will match our
SATA array
with 12 disks (when we eventually get hold of a recent controller).

What I am saying is you bought some respectable hardware at a premium price
to accomplish a specific job. You castrated the system by anchoring it with
SATA and you are now seeing the pitfalls. I gave you practical real world
advice from experience that is tough to accept because you have a good
investment in SATA. My suggestion of SCSI doesn't look appealing because of
the initial cost. When you factor in ease of deployment, reliability,
longevity, and performance you quickly realize it pays for itself in short
order.

A few people and a resident troll gave you a few options. I gave you my
opinion on what to do, go SCSI and don't look back. The troll gave you a
typical answer of throwing hardware at it till you get the results you want.
Does that sound logical to you? Does that sound like a suggestion from
someone that has real world experience? Here's his quote

"What you're going to have to do though is try the various boards in your
server until you find one that hits your performance objectives or have
gone through all of them"

This is great advice if you have a source for unlimited hardware that isn't
going to cost you anything. Sure, take this route and spend another grand
or two and you will be right were you could have been in the first place
without the performance, SCSI.

I apologize for sounding so harsh, but this is your baby. When it takes a
crap, it's you that has the aggravation, expense, and egg on your face, not
me. I've been down this road many times with customers that bought into the
SATA crap pushed on them by inexperience hardware pushers and bailed them
out for a substantial price.

If you are really insistent on using SATA find someone that has a server
deployed that meets your specs and pick their brain for ideas of what
hardware to buy before you spend any more. Good luck in your endeavors.



Rita


--
http://www.geocities.com/ritaberk2003/

news.tele.dk wrote:

Yes it cost pennies, in Danish currency:

Maxtor Atlas 10K 146Gb = 3760,78
Maxtor DiamondMax 160Gb = 606,80

So what youre saying is: "The speed of SCSI disks is more than 6
times that of SATA".
Eg. when we buy an array of disk with 2 SCSI disks it will match our
SATA array
with 12 disks (when we eventually get hold of a recent controller).

What I am saying is you bought some respectable hardware at a premium price
to accomplish a specific job. You castrated the system by anchoring it with
SATA and you are now seeing the pitfalls. I gave you practical real world
advice from experience that is tough to accept because you have a good
investment in SATA. My suggestion of SCSI doesn't look appealing because of
the initial cost. When you factor in ease of deployment, reliability,
longevity, and performance you quickly realize it pays for itself in short
order.

A few people and a resident troll gave you a few options. I gave you my
opinion on what to do, go SCSI and don't look back. The troll gave you a
typical answer of throwing hardware at it till you get the results you want.
Does that sound logical to you? Does that sound like a suggestion from
someone that has real world experience? Here's his quote

"What you're going to have to do though is try the various boards in your
server until you find one that hits your performance objectives or have
gone through all of them"

This is great advice if you have a source for unlimited hardware that isn't
going to cost you anything. Sure, take this route and spend another grand
or two and you will be right were you could have been in the first place
without the performance, SCSI.

I apologize for sounding so harsh, but this is your baby. When it takes a
crap, it's you that has the aggravation, expense, and egg on your face, not
me. I've been down this road many times with customers that bought into the
SATA crap pushed on them by inexperience hardware pushers and bailed them
out for a substantial price.

If you are really insistent on using SATA find someone that has a server
deployed that meets your specs and pick their brain for ideas of what
hardware to buy before you spend any more. Good luck in your endeavors.


Rita


--
http://www.geocities.com/ritaberk2003/

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:39:11 -0500, "Rita Ä Berkowitz"
wrote:

news.tele.dk wrote:

Yes it cost pennies, in Danish currency:

Maxtor Atlas 10K 146Gb = 3760,78
Maxtor DiamondMax 160Gb = 606,80

So what youre saying is: "The speed of SCSI disks is more than 6
times that of SATA".
Eg. when we buy an array of disk with 2 SCSI disks it will match our
SATA array
with 12 disks (when we eventually get hold of a recent controller).

What I am saying is you bought some respectable hardware at a premium price
to accomplish a specific job. You castrated the system by anchoring it with
SATA and you are now seeing the pitfalls. I gave you practical real world
advice from experience that is tough to accept because you have a good
investment in SATA. My suggestion of SCSI doesn't look appealing because of
the initial cost. When you factor in ease of deployment, reliability,
longevity, and performance you quickly realize it pays for itself in short
order.


delurking

In about six months, I'm going to be in the market for a 2TB system, and will
have to make some of the same choices. Rita, _why_ is SCSI so much better than
SATA?

Thanks much,


--
tim boyer

Tim Boyer wrote:

In about six months, I'm going to be in the market for a 2TB system,
and will have to make some of the same choices. Rita, _why_ is SCSI
so much better than SATA?

Tim, not knowing exactly what your requirements are, I'll just repeat in the
simplest terms what I said in a previous post, "When you factor in ease of
deployment, reliability, longevity, and performance you quickly realize it
pays for itself in short order." That said, depending on your requirements
SATA might be better for you if you have minimal demands and expectations.

Rita
--
http://www.geocities.com/ritaberk2003/

"Rita Ä Berkowitz" wrote in message
...

Rita
--
http://www.geocities.com/ritaberk2003/


Is that a picture of you?