Re: Best use of second controller with faster disks?

On Jun 12, 2007, at 8:33 PM, Francisco Reyes wrote:

> Vivek Khera writes:
>
>> what raid card have you got?
>
> 2 3ware cards.
> I believe both are 9550SX
>> i'm playing with an external enclosure  which has an areca sata
>> raid in it and connects to the host via fibre  channel.
>
> What is the OS? FreeBSD?

FreeBSD, indeed.  The vendor, Partners Data Systems, did a wonderful
job ensuring that everything integrated well to the point of talking
with various FreeBSD developers, LSI engineers, etc., and sent me a
fully tested system end-to-end with a Sun X4100 M2, LSI 4Gb Fibre
card, and their RAID array, with FreeBSD installed already.

I can't recommend them enough -- if you need a high-end RAID system
for FreeBSD (or other OS, I suppose) do check them out.

>> Right now I'm testing an 8-disk RAID6 configuration on the same
>> device; it seems slower than the 16-disk RAID6, but I haven't yet
>> tried 8-disk RAID10 with dedicated log yet.
>
> Is all this within the same controller?

Yes,  the system is in testing right now, so I'm playing with all
sort of different disk configurations and it seems that the 16-disk
RAID6 is the winner so far.  The next best was the 14-disk RAID6 + 2
disk RAID1 for log.

I have separate disks built-in to the system for boot.