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RAID controller to boost IOP

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nstgc:
@datora SATA III is the 6.0Gbps specification. I think it has some other nifty properties as well (in addtion to the doubled theoretical transfer rate), but they aren't as significant as the jump from SATA I to II (in fact I think its a bit silly for a mechanical drive).

I am looking at the PCIe type (in particular 4 and 8 lanes). PCI-X and PCIe 1x or 2x are a bit of a joke if you are looking for performance. This will be for a speed boost in my PC. I'm also looking for some redundency.

Don't assume Windows 7. I'd also like it to work with Linux. The last Raid card I had, in addtion to constantly losing drives, was absolutely not capatible with linux (piece of shit RockRAID 2310). Also, at that time, I didn't understand that there were RAID cards that weren't pure software, but also weren't pure hardware (I'm pretty sure the Adaptec I mentioned is such a card).

@Kitamesume I'm trying to avoid software. Also, that sounds less like a RAID and more like massive data caching. I don't have enough RAM for that anyway. That is a nifty idea though. I think thats the basis of one of Intel's SSDs actually.


In general, the reason I'm asking about IOPs is that for any RAID card that isn't total crap, the RAID 5 performance will aproximately scale under synthetic benchmarks (al beit at N-1) and I'm sure that a $300 card will have a decent RAID 1 algorithem. What I'm wondering is if there are any that can handle multiple requests at a time. Meaning that, if the CPU is asking for two small files, then it will assign one drive to one file and the other to the other file. Another thing I'm looking for is a "decent" (whatever that means) amount of cache. I assume that a large cache should help with larger files. If it does have cache, I definately want it to have a battery.

@Freedom Kira I don't use AMD processors. The problem with SSDs is that they are too small and too expensive. My windows partition is 440GB and I had to uninstall a couple games in order to defrag the drive.

Freedom Kira:
What does AMD have to do with anything? o.O

nstgc:
Intel doesn't make chipsets for AMD motherboards.

kmarch:
Look into Areca raid controllers they are really nice!

per:
First, is this for your workstation or a server?

The recommendations would be rather different depending on what the usecase is.

For a workstation one or two SSD:s will produce significantly more IOP:s than any classical drives can ever do.

For a server you will get way better performance and large capacity if you use something like a ZFS raid with the desired number of cheap 2Gb drives coupled with a dumb SATA controller and a SSD read/write cache drive (or multiple, depending on exactly how much IOP you neeed...)

And as for avoiding software, software raids almost always produce better performance, and is most definately safer (at least if you stay away from linux LLVM or Windows software raid).

It is, of course, somewhat hard to share between different operating systems.

Thus, a large NAS server is usually the best solution. With a 1Gb (or 2Gb, if you have 2x1Gb network cards and are willing to spend quite some time setting up bonding..) connection to the server you get high enough streaming bandwidth for most things, and the random access times will be very low if the NAS server has a few Gb of RAM and a SSD cache.

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