Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 30192
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2025/05/28 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/28    

2004/5/12-13 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:30192 Activity:high
5/12    My work is planning on ordering a raid box and we're considering
        going with fibre channel instead of scsi.  none of us have worked
        with fibre channel.  can anyone recommed for/against any brand of
        fibre channel?  the raid manufacturer is quoting us with a qlogic
        board.  we'll be running it on linux, but experience with any os
        is appreciated.
        \_ You will be able to get *lots* of bandwidth over the fibre
           channel solution, assuming you are going with 7+ drives.  The
           CSUA has a fibre channel raid array that hosts the office
           accounts and the debian mirror, plus some.  It is running
           software raid 5.  We only have a 1Gbit backplane, which I
           can easily saturate when doing linear disk access.  Qlogic is
           the defacto fibre channel controller card.  Make sure you have
           at least a QLA2200 card.  I wasted 6 months of lockups when
           doing testing with a QLA2000 card.  No driver issues
           since the change-over.  If you have any questions, let me know.
           -- njh
           \- helo how much $ did you spend for how much storage?
              i have some SATA numbers built fairly cheeply but an
              curious about the perf gain if we spend a little more $
              ok tnx. --psb
              \_ About $2000 for 1/2TB of 10K RPM 36GB drives in 2 chassis
                 with redundant power supplies.  This was for surplus,
                 unused netapp hardware w/1 year warranty, and 2 spare disks.
                 And no, I can't get such a good deal anymore.
        \_ Or you could get an external hardware raid box like the Arena from
           Maxtronic.  The low end boxes are IDE drives attached via FC or
           SCSI (your choice).  Rock solid.  Cheap enough with decent perf.
        \_ you didn't mention what os you're planning on using it with.  I
           can tell you now to avoid JNI cards like the plague.  We're still
           having issues (linux)
        \_ apple xserve RAID
2025/05/28 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/28    

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