On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Brett Delmage <brett [ at ] twobikes [ dot ] ottawa [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca>wrote: > On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Charles Nadeau wrote: > > Here are my questions: >> • Is SATA III really worth the price difference knowing that my server >> will >> serve at most 3 clients and that I will run RAID 5 or 6? Right now I am >> not >> focusing on absolute speed but on stability and responsiveness. >> > > Except for Flash drives, I have not seen any online info that indicates > that spinning drives are fast enough for SATA III. i.e. no harm, but don't > waste money. > This is what I was thinking, thanks for confirming it. > > You might want to know if your chipset/mobo has the actual bandwidth behind > the bus to be able to fully utilize it. Apparently not always... > AMD's SB850 is better than the Marvell solution for this. > > • Has anybody used “Green” drives (Samsung, WD, Seagate) with Linux >> software >> >> RAID? I read that “Green” drives in RAID may be problematic because the >> TLER >> delay is too short. The RAID may mistakenly consider a drive to have >> failed >> and kick it out of the array. >> > > Been using two WD green drives, soft RAID 1, on my ubuntu 9.10 (I think) > mythtv box, since Jan. No observed issues, and I have monitored the SMART > stats for any of those reported issues, like unload cycles. I have not seen > the drive rebuilding much, except due to power failures or hard shutdown > errors, and not even always then. yay for md 'write intent' bitmaps! > > I have also read and believe that there CAN be an issue. I just have not > encountered it myself, yet. > > If you are worried about speed at all though, why use a slower drive? > I am not worried that much by speed of the individual disks as I'll RAID them. I was looking at the green drive mostly to reduce electrical comsumption and save a few $ > > Don't get me wrong, I use a combination of many 'regular' and green drives > - for many of my purposes green drives are fast enough and I'd rather have 2 > (RAID 1) x 2 TB + 1 backup drive at a good price.. > > I've mostly tended to go with WD Caviar blacks because the 5 year warranty > makes me feel more confident, and Seagate pissed me off with their firmware > 'bricking' errors two years ago that could result in total data loss of my > photos and video. > > • Does anybody know a Linux-friendly PCIe SATA controller that is NOT >> RAID-enabled? >> > > Heh - I've _just_ been looking for one before I saw your message! Came > across this > > http://pccyber.com/?v=Product&i=IO-ST-PEXSATA24E > > and would seem to be supported by Linux. Too bad not in stock, I really > would like it NOW... can't seem to find on in town. > > I haven't looked at it really closely yet, it might have flaws, like maybe > not enough bus bandwidth for all connected drives running together? > (infrequent in my case). > I also heard that on some LSI card you can flash the RAID Bios to put a JBOD BIOS. I'll have to dig this deeper. This is no an immediate concern. If I run out of space within a year, I may have to get one. > > I've been quite happy with the quality of Startech products. > > quick answers for now.. good luck, and keep us informed, please. > Thanks! > > cheers > > Brett > -- Charles Nadeau Ph.D. http://charlesnadeau.blogspot.com/