Selecting the Best Raid Controller

[enealDC]

I'm having lots of trouble with Adaptec controllers. Anyone got any suggestions for a good stable SAS RAID controller? I need it to drive 32+ drives...

[To-M]

Surprised you are having issues with adaptec as I have heard good things about new speeds from there new chipsets.

32 drives from a single controller had someone all me last month using the LSI 8888ELP with a SAS expander of up 30 drives (2 x RAID 6's).


http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/prod...elp/index.html

[enealDC]

Well it's not the speed that's troubling me. As you know, the performance and stability of these products differ drastically when running on Linux. With the 51245 with 15 Drives raid0, I was getting 1GB throughput on Windows 2003. On Linux, I could only get max 500MB.

The problem is i'm getting alot of command aborts and it is affecting the VMs now..

[To-M]

On one of our test systems we have 2 DSS with the 3Ware 9690's and Areca 1680 and using the Auto Failover w/ VMware and have not received these abort messages so far. The LSI 8888ELP that the customer is using is not using it with VMware.

Anyone with this Adaptec controller receiving these error messages?

[enealDC]

I also have an Areca 1680. It appears to be running fine. I haven't had any issues - yet...

[beng]

G'day Eneal,
What drives are you running with the Adaptec?
We've had a lot of problems with Seagate ES.2's until you update the firmware from SNx to ANx.
The Adaptec KB article is here:
Ask Adaptec
Strangely they have now qualified the KB to state that the SN05 firmware (the level shipped to us mid 2008) is ok for the 51245.

The other thing to check is it may be network related, if you download the logfiles from DSS and look in the test.log for the hdparm entires. This should give you an idea of what the raw speed of the Raid0 array is.

Rgds Ben