Benjamin,
> Have you done any benchmarking of the 9550SX against a software raid configuration?
Interesting - no, not on SATA, mostly because I've had awful luck with Linux drivers and SATA. The popular
manufacturersof SATA to PCI bridge chipsets are Silicon Image and Highpoint, and I've not seen Linux work with them at
anyreasonable performance yet. I've also had problems with Adaptec's cards - I think they manufacture their own SATA
toPCI chipset as well. So far, I've only had good luck with the on-chipset Intel SATA implementation. I think the
problemsI've had could be entirely driver-related, but in the end it doesn't matter if you can't find drivers that work
forLinux.
The other problem is getting enough SATA connections for the number of disks we want. I do have two new Areca SATA
RAIDcards and I'm going to benchmark those against the 3Ware 9550SX with 2 x 8 = 16 disks on one host.
I guess we could run the HW RAID controllers in JBOD mode to get a good driver / chipset configuration for software
RAID,but frankly I prefer HW RAID if it performs well. So far the SATA host-based RAID is blowing the doors off of
everyother HW RAID solution I've tested.
- Luke