On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 9:11 PM, Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org> wrote:
>
> On Mar 2, 2008, at 2:37 AM, Steve Poe wrote:
>
> > I need to consider a vendor for the new disc array (6-
> > to 8 discs). The local vendor (in the San Francisco Bay Area),
> > I've not been completely pleased with, so I am considering using
> > Dell storage connecting to an retail version LSI MegaRAID 320-2X card.
> >
> > Anyone use any vendors that have been supportive of Postgresql?
>
> I've been 1000% satisfied with Partners Data for my RAID systems. I
> connect to the host boxes with a fibre channel. They've gone above
> and beyond expectations for supporting my FreeBSD systems. I don't
> know if/how they support postgres as I never asked for that help.
> Their prices are excellent, too.
>
> As for your plan to hook up Dell storage to a 320-2x card, the last
> time I did that, the lsi card complained that one of the drives in the
> 14-disk chassis was down. Identical on two different arrays I had.
> Dell swapped nearly every single part, yet the LSI card still
> complained. I had to drop the drives to U160 speed to get it to even
> recognize all the drives.
Is there still some advantage to U320 over SAS? I'm just wondering
why one would be building a new machine with U320 instead of SAS
nowadays.
And I've never had any of the problems you list with LSI cards. The
only issue I've seen is mediocre RAID-10 performance on their cards
many years ago, when I was testing them for our database server.
Adaptec controllers, especially RAID controllers have been nothing but
problematic for me, with random lockups every month or two. Just
enough to make it really dangerous, not often enough to make it easy
to troubleshoot. In those systems the lockup problems were solved
100% by switching to LSI based controllers.