[mythtv-users] ide controller advice

Mike Schiller mdschiller.mythtv at gmail.com
Sun Dec 25 22:16:25 EST 2005


OK, but can anyone recommend a cheap IDE controller, or does anyone
have experience with the two IDE controllers I mentioned, for non-RAID
use, since I'm simply using LVM to get a large volume size and don't
care if I have the redundancy of raid.  I'm especially interested to
know if any of the two models (or other cheap ones) have SMART support
and will power down my drives after a period of inactivity (my
IT/ITE8212 --sorry for mislabeling it 82812 earlier -- doesn't seem to
do this).

Thanks,
Mike

On 12/25/05, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 25 December 2005 14:09, John Andersen wrote:
> > On 12/16/05, Jon Whitear <jon at whitear.org> wrote:
> > > My research indicated that 'cheap' IDE RAID controllers aren't worth it
> > > - they do the RAID in software (the driver) anyway, so you might as well
> > > use Linux software RAID. If you want RAID in hardware, the 3ware
> > > controllers are well supported.
> >
> > Exactly.  Software Raid is stable and scales with the processor
> > when you upgrade
>
> Software RAID takes up hardly any cpu at all, even w/RAID 5. Scaling with the
> processor isn't something to worry about if you have any cpu made in the last
> three or four years. The only big cpu hits are if you have to reconstruct an
> array.
>
> > whereas the hardware raid is as fast on day
> > one as it will ever get.
>
> That's not exactly true. Some hardware RAID controllers perform better on one
> motherboard or another for various reasons. For example, I have a PCI-X LSI
> MegaRAID 320-1 controller that is absolutely pathetic (max 15MB/s througput)
> on a dual Xeon motherboard, but performs about 5x better on a dual Opteron
> motherboard (same drives in both cases).
>
> > Still, it sounded like the OP was not using anything other
> > than raid 0 (concatenation) and this is just as well done with
> > LVM as with any form of raid.
>
> RAID 0 is NOT concatenation, it is striping. A concatenated array means data
> is first written to drive 1, once its full, writing begins on drive 2, and so
> on. A striped array means data is written to all drives in the array at once,
> in parallel ("striped" across the disks).
>
> But yes, cheap SATA/IDE RAID controllers are mostly worthless.
>
> --
> Jarod Wilson
> jarod at wilsonet.com
>
>
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