"Real" RAID5 performance test

[mdmint]

I just got an email from my Escalade 9500S-8 controller in my SageServer alerting me to a problem. HD1 had dropped offline and rebuild initiated to online spare HD7. This will be a good real life performance test. Two shows were and are recording! I reseated HD1 and it came back to life, assigned it as online spare 'till replacement arrives, advanced replacement RMA already done online with WDC. (Gotta love WDC ease of RMA )

[sixdoubleo]

Nice. How old was the drive?

One of the issues I have is that now with the 1yr warranty on drives, we dont get our free lunch anymore.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by sixdoubleo

Nice. How old was the drive?

A couple months ago I'd replaced all 8 model WD2500JD standard SATA drives in the array with WD2500SD optimized for RAID SATA drives under warranty replacement so a couple months old.

One of the issues I have is that now with the 1yr warranty on drives, we dont get our free lunch anymore.

Many retail drives now only have 1yr warranty but not all. Seagate retail drives 5yr and Hitachi 3yr IRRC. While WD retail packaged drives 1yr warranty WD OEM barebone drives 3yr. (like you'd can get from Newegg.)

[Crashless]

I noticed that your server uses a 64bit raid controller, but only has 32 bit slots. How does that work out for you? How's the performance? Did you have to do anything special to make it work? Can you still install a second raid card if you want to the same system?

Sorry for the barage of questions, I'm thinking about retiring my current HTPC to a server roll next year, and it uses the same MB as yours. I'm researching what my options are in terms of sata raid cards and all the 8+ drive models are either pci-x or 64 bit pci and I thought I needed to get a server mother board to make it work. Is this not the case?

Thanks so much for the help.

[sixdoubleo]

Originally Posted by Crashless

I noticed that your server uses a 64bit raid controller, but only has 32 bit slots. How does that work out for you? How's the performance? Did you have to do anything special to make it work? Can you still install a second raid card if you want to the same system?

Sorry for the barage of questions, I'm thinking about retiring my current HTPC to a server roll next year, and it uses the same MB as yours. I'm researching what my options are in terms of sata raid cards and all the 8+ drive models are either pci-x or 64 bit pci and I thought I needed to get a server mother board to make it work. Is this not the case?

Thanks so much for the help.

I'm not mdmint, but can answer the part about the 32/64 bit card as I just installed an Escalade myself. The card is made for 32 or 64-bit PCI slots. The extra 64-bit connector just simply hangs off the edge. As long as your MB is PCI 2.2 compliant you're good to go.

As for performance, my 7506 in a K7S5A w/1300Mhz Duron is smokin fast. (meaning....almost no CPU utilization and can keep up with standalone hard drives, Gigabit LAN, etc)

If you want any specific copy times, let me know and I can try it. In fact, I wouldn't mind establishing some baselines for copying a 1GB file over network to RAID, from RAID, to HTPC, etc... Might give us all some benhcmarks to shoot for...

[Crashless]

That is SUCH a relief. On both my mind, and my wallet. That means I can proceed as I orginally planned, and I don't have to buy some ridiculously expensive server board.

As far as performance, I'm not exactly looking for uncompressed HD recording, but I suppose I'm curious to see if 64-bit makes a big enough difference to go for the server board. I'm mainly looking for 3 SD streams and 1-2 HD streams, so roughly 58 mbits/sec. for recording and 58 playback. So total 116mbits/sec sustained. Which now that I write that down, isn't that much at all.

I'm future proofing my system, hence the huge stream numbers.

[mdmint]

As a performance note on Escalade 9500S-8 running in standard 32bit PCE slot 7HD Sata array. Last night with a failed drive so running under parity reconstruction, and rebuilding to online spare, the two Std DVD Q recordings occurring during said operations tested playback today no problem, no jerkiness to the recordings caused by slow access or anything.

I've also tested simultaneously 5x Mpeg2 max recordings with 3 Client playback no problems (5 recording was then my limit, could try 7 now but haven't done that type of testing since adding a 500MCE) Of course those tests weren't with a failed HD in the array and I'm not going to intentionally fail a drive just for testing, to many recordings at risk!