[LAU] serial ata

[Florin Andrei]

Dan Easley wrote:
> 
> Now I'm in the market for a brand new computer, that I'd like to throw
> some 500gig sata drives in.  Has anyone had any experience using
> really big drives like that with onboard sata controllers?  If so,
> what brand/chipset drive/motherboards are you using?  (feel free to
> reply privately if you think this will degenerate into advertisements)

I've a big pile of servers like this, with more to come:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856152013

Using 250GB and 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives. Solid as a rock.

Warning: on-board RAID sucks with most motherboards. It's not really 
RAID, it's called "fake RAID" (works on Windows with some special drivers).
If you really want to do hardware RAID, buy a card (see below).

I did some serious data mining on a couple of them, with a big MySQL 5 
database and software RAID (mirroring). The thing moves pretty fast. Now 
I put 3ware 9650SE SATA PCI Express RAID cards in a couple servers and 
will rebuild the database in a single-master replication schema. Once I 
get the battery backup I will enable the write cache. I expect to see a 
performance increase with that.
I've two 500GB drives each server in mirror RAID just for the database.

I even played with 750GB drives on a slightly older architecture, I 
think it's the GT20 instead of GT24, worked pretty well.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/