Thoughts on the HighPoint 4320 SAS/SATA RAID card

[Snooper]

I had just about decided to upgrade my onboard RAID5 (on Asus P5B Deluxe) in my main home system and use the Areca 1220 so I could add another drive to the array as well as get better performance than the onboard RAID would allow for.

Then I saw the blurb on the frontpage about the HighPoint 4320 SAS/SATA card this morning. The price is definitely right and the card does use a faster I/O processor than the 1220 as well. Plus, being a SAS card, that gives me more options in the future.

So what are peoples thoughts on the 4320 vs. the 1220? Also, does anyone have any recommendations on the correct SFF-8087 to multi SATA cable for the 4320?

Thanks!

 

[Viper GTS]

Here's an example of the cable you need:

http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_...adapters/I3629-05M.asp

Alternatively if you don't want integrated power:

http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_...es_adapters/F7H87D.asp

I just noticed that myself, for $349 I am very tempted. I'll wait to see what AT has to say about it but I have been thinking about a new controller for my desktop.

Viper GTS

 

[Snooper]

Viper,

Would this 3Ware cable work?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816116098

It would definitely simplify things to get everything from newegg. I think I have about convenced myself to give the 4320 a try. That price is just very hard to refuse. Plus, it's not a mission critical system, so if there are any glitches because it is a HighPoint, it's not the end of the world for me.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[Viper GTS]

Yup that looks fine too.

Viper GTS

 

[jkresh]

Snooper did you pick up the highpoint? I am considering it (or the areca or adaptec) and am curious as to your opinion if you bought it.

 

[ping2low]

I just upgraded from my P5W64 mobos RAID to this card tonight using same cables. The cables arrived a day early because they were shipped directly from 3Ware.

Using HD Tune 2.54, I went from 100.5MB/sec average RAID0 (on board) to 189.0MB/sec RAID0, RAID5 is now 95.6 MB/sec on the card. This was using 3 Seagate ST3750640AS drives (7200.10-750GB). I was hoping the card would allow multiple arrays with different RAID levels on a single drive, but I haven't figured that one out yet. I can't wait to migrate my WD74 Raptops
I will be using Acronis to inject the new driver so I don't have to rebuild. It will be nice to add the drive from my backups. The OCE/ORLM feature is very nice. It took 3.5 hours to initialize the drives in the foreground the first time in RAID5 (3x750GB). Card is being used in conjunction with a MB455SPF Icy Dock drive Bay. Looking to add the smaller 453 model brother in the near future to hold a total of 8 drives.

 

[jkresh]

ping2low that raid 5 number seems a little small, have you benchmarked those drives individually and if so what numbers are you getting? My card came in today along with the cables (.6m 3m ones but my drives for this wont be in until Tuesday (4 1.5tb caviar greens))

 

[pjkenned]

I'm curious to hear more about the highpoint also. Did you get the battery back-up? I bought a 5805 to replace the Supermicro S8iR (very similar to the 5805 to the point that I could just plug and play the raid 5 array over) and came really close to getting that highpoint. Got the new 5805 for $410 and had an extra BBU from the Supermicro so the cost was a bit cheaper in my situation with CA's crazy sales tax.

Does highpoint have something similar to Adaptec Storage Manager/LSI MegaRaid software that lets you admin arrays over a network?

 

[jkresh]

pjkenned, didn't get the battery back-up, I don't think its available yet (will probably pick it up when it is but depends on price and if I keep the highpoint or go adaptec/areca), not sure about network admin yet, haven't installed it (may not get a chance before monday and probably won't have much of a chance to setup the array until later in the week or early the following week).

(just checked newegg, looks like the battery for the 3320 might work with the 4320 but its >$100 so I will see if I am keeping the card before I buy it)

also since I have a ups, how important is the battery on the raid card? Would it help in case of a crash or just if the power goes out, if its just useful in a power failure then my ups should provide enough time to finish whatever writes are happening before I shutdown so I doubt I would ever end up making use of the battery.

(so far I have no reason to think I would not keep the card but I am leaving the option of returning it and going to the adaptec or areca if I have issues).


As an aside, how did you get the 5805 for $410? That is a lot cheaper then I have seen it for anywhere.

 

[ping2low]

the feature i liked most about the card is its ability to create different RAID arrays on the same set of drives and i could only do this within the bios. for example, i created a RAID0 & a RAID1 partition on the same set of raptops. after i verified this worked, i replaced that with several RAID0 arrays and a single 2TB RAID5 on the seagates7200 series drives. goal is to have 8x 750GB~1TB seagates in various RAID sets for performance and redundancy. time to sell the raptors.

initialization takes forever!

 

[pjkenned]

Originally posted by: ping2low
initialization takes forever!

Hardware raid is really meant for the always on crowd. No reboots and you don't notice it. Just imagine that my main PC has a 5805 and 3085 booting up now

On the different raid levels, I think even the ICH10R may do that now. It is a great feature, but like you I end up just doing raid 5 or 6 across my arrays.

jkresh: The 5805 deal was just that I checked ebay and saw that someone was selling one nearby (I live in Silicon Valley so stuff frequently is sold as extras). Unopened sealed box so that was a good thing, as was the fact that I managed to e-mail the guy, get a better price, and the card within 35min.

I do BBU's on all of the cards even with the IBM UPS. The problem I get worried about is if the failure happens when I am not around and something goes wrong with the UPS shutdown routine. I think my UPS right now would last my PC's 10 min or so. BBU's last 2-3 days usually.

Again this is a to each their own type of thing probably.

I did find a very strange hole in the 5805's performance when one uses ATTO @ 64k reads. For some reason 32k-8MB is 500-600MB/s write and 600-700MB/s read, except for @ 64k when write seems in-line yet read is falling to 80MB/s. Strange indeed, even with the newest firmware.

Snooper: Just get any brand name SFF-8087 cable. When you do, one nice feature (not in tech specs) is the fact that some have the 4 ports labeled 0-3 or 1-4. That's a great feature for troubleshooting.

 

[ping2low]

The OCE/ORLM feature is nice, but performance hasn't been gained everytime I used it so far. Once the migration is complete, performance isn't that much better even after I added another disk and the RAID level has changed. To change RAID level from RAID0 to RAID5 and back to RAID0 while adding a disk in the process is helpful. Unfortunately, I lost performance in the mix somewhere. I never saw the added performance of the extra drive I added. I'm probably better off starting from stratch w/ my OS partition after a clean initialization if I wanted to see the best performance. My version of Acronis TI didn't work (v9.1). Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but HDDs write from the outside of the platter in...faster initially...getting slower. If you create a huge partition first, then your OS partition second (which is what happens when you play with OCE/ORLM) you only get the left overs on the inside on the platters (slowest). I created a 75GB, then a 2TB, then ORML 'd onto the remaining 60~70GB that was left, after adding another 750GB drive and creating a 2TB partition. Defrag didn't make a bit a difference. I'm only seeing around 185MB/s when i expected it to be 240-260. My block sizes are default.
jkresh, did you get yours runnin?


0-|

 

[jkresh]

ping2low, card is installed and drives are in, raid 5 array is building. Looks like it will finish sometime late tomorrow then I can run some benchmarks. I did run hd tach and hd tune on the individual drives (1 of them anyway), so I will post that in comparison with the 4 disk array, either tomorrow or Saturday.

ping2low, that 185 is with how many of the drives?
also are you running multiple raid types on the same drives (do you have 8 drives
with all 8 being in part of a 5 and part of a 0 or am I missing something from your prior posts)?
If you have multiple raid types using the same drives then performance of any one type
will be impacted by what the other is doing.

 

[GCS]

Not to hijack but since you guys are discussing things can I interject and ask if anyone has an opinion on the Areca ARC-1170 card? It is a 24 Port RAID card in PCI-x form.

I am thinking of using one in my media server (will end up being 20 1TB WD Green Drives eventually) or a 3Ware 9650SE-16MIL (yeah it's only 16 ports but highly recommended)

I got the Areca card for less than $400 so hopefully it isn't too bad.

Greg

 

[jkresh]

Greg, I don't know much about that areca card, but I would think pci-x would be limiting for 20 drives, if you do keep it I would definitely go to 1gig of cache (newegg has the module for $100) as the 256megs cant be enough for that many drives. Also I would hope if you are going to 20 drives that you are going to use raid 6 or 01 or 10 as raid 5 with that many drives would be asking for trouble.

What do you plan on using to hold the 20 drives? Might be cheaper to go with 10 of the 2tb greens, as it would mean you could use a card with 12 ports instead of 20 and you would need less space for the drives (+ less power and lower chance of failure). Even 12 of the 1.5's might make sense in your case over 20 of the 1tb ones (unless you need the extra speed, however I would suspect that with that areca you wouldn't see much of a difference in speed from 10 to 20 drives as you would end up saturating the pci x buss at some point).

 

[GCS]

Media Server streaming videos and music to 3-4 spots around the house.

I will actually be doing multiple Raid 5 arrays of 5 drives each. I'll be doing this for a multitude of reasons.

I would love to use the 2TB drives (or even 1.5s) but the cost per TB is too high. At the moment the 1TB drives are the sweet spot for price/TB.

I can also get a 3Ware 9650se-16MIL card which is PCI-e of course (roughly same price). I like what folks have to say about the 3Ware cards but unfortunately the card only supports 16 drives so I would have to go with a second card somewhere along the way once needed (may not be a problem for a long time of course)

Greg

 

[pjkenned]

Pretty sure Dell sold me my 1.5TB drives for <$100 each, and I have lots of them. If you are going to spend that much money on drives, it may pay to do some shopping.

 

[ping2low]

jkresh...
all drives are ST3750640AS unless stated otherwise, using HD Tune 2.54
the 185MB/s was actually 189.0 with 3xST3750640AS in RAID0 (2199GB) after going back looking at the screenshot.

Since adding the extra drive using ORLM, I did get 297.1MB/s with 4xST3750640AS in RAID0 (145GB).

I still think I screwed myself over by partitioning my data set first instead of creating the OS partitions...I will probably have to repartition everything to become optimum. This goes back to the point where I said the heads read from the fastest point of the drive to the slowest...I want my OS to be on the fastest, using RAID0.

Single ST3750640AS using motherboard SATA port pulled a 64.1MB/s (750GB), this drive had some data on it too..

I just ran a test w/ the results of 150MB/s with 4xST3750640AS (RAID0, 75GB), but i'm also running a verify on the same drives, but different partition (RAID5, 2TB) and also wiping another drive on the 4320 card that's not associated with this array using disk director.

The ability to have a RAID5 & RAID0 partition on the same set of drives is very helpful for performance and reliability. I use the RAID0 for my OS and save the backups to the RAID5 partition. I currently have a total of 4x750GB drives and 1TB that I'm going to return. I also have two 74GD raptors I'm going to sell on ebay and probably end up buying a X25-M or two...

 

[pjkenned]

It would be interesting to see the results (ATTO too) of the 4 drives in Raid 5. Since the IOP348 we know should be good for several hundred MB/s in raid 5, I would wonder how much better, on a 4 drive array, Raid 0 is versus Raid 5.

 

[JASTECH]

If i may ask a question? I am thining of getting the LSISAS3081E-R and run Hitachi SAS 15k 16mb cach drives with it. Is the LSI card any good compared to what you are using?

Thanks, JASTECH

 

[ping2low]

ATTO RAID5 with 4x7200.10 750GB drives

ATTO RAID0 with 4x7200.10 750GB drives

My OS was running on the RAID0 when the test was run...

 

[pjkenned]

Originally posted by: JASTECH
If i may ask a question? I am thining of getting the LSISAS3081E-R and run Hitachi SAS 15k 16mb cach drives with it. Is the LSI card any good compared to what you are using?

Thanks, JASTECH

That LSI card is significantly lower end. In fact, it doesn't support raid 5/6.

Those numbers aren't too bad with 4 drives, although that's not enough output to be more than an IOP333 can handle. Great data-point though!

 

[Snooper]

Originally posted by: jkresh
Snooper did you pick up the highpoint? I am considering it (or the areca or adaptec) and am curious as to your opinion if you bought it.

Yes I did. And I am very happy with it. The 45 seconds or so for initialization doesn't bother me in the least (but then, I used to be a NetApp system admin, so I've seen a LOT longer!).

Originally, I had four 320GB Seagate 7200.10 ES drives in RAID 5 on my P5B Deluxe. At the time I took it down to upgrade, I was getting right at 150MB/s read speeds out of the array and much slower write speeds. DVD game installs took about twice as long to install to the RAID as they did to the single drive that was the system disk (exact same disk model all around, 320 ES drives).

After upgrading, it is not a 100% apples to apples comparison as I now have five of the 320GB ES drives in the RAID 5 and the system disk was upgraded to a 300GB VelociRaptor. But, my read speeds are up around 310MB/s which is definitely noticeable even in day to day use (application launches are noticeably faster).

What is even more noticeable is the write speeds. I haven't measured the write speeds yet (yes, I really need to get off my butt and do it!), but the seat of the pants feel is that writes are now about 50% FASTER to the array than to the single system disk which was upgraded to the 300GB VelociRaptor... While I have 25% more spindles in the array, the majority of the improvement came from the controller.

The only near issue with this car in my P5B Deluxe has to do with capacitors on the MB. There is a notch in the controller card between the case plate and the card edge connector. There are four caps on the P5B that will JUST clear that notch. I had to straighten up the caps so they would fit into the notch before I could seat the card. The tops of the caps just touch the top of that notch too, so any MBs with larger caps there will not fit this card.

All in all, I am very happy with this controller. I like that I can install 3 more drives into the array if I need/want more capacity or more speed and I really like the cabling on this controller versus the mess that was in there originally.

 

[JASTECH]

pjkenned, I endeded up ordering a LSI 8408E MegaRAID 256Mb. I hope this is a little better then what I was going to get?

Thanks, JASTECH