[Asterisk-biz] SATA Drives RAID 1.. and Asterisk .. someone?

[Darryl Ross]

Michael Welter wrote:
> Carlos Hernandez wrote:
> 
>> Hello all:
>>
>> could someone please mention your experiences with SATA or IDE RAID-1
>> installations for Asterisk?
 >>
 >> I need to recommend a hardware solution.
 >>
 >> This machine will only have a TDM card and a few IP phones..to start
 >> with,
 >> but they might grow.
 >>
> Don't do software RAID.  When it becomes necessary to re-sync a drive, 
> it pegs the processor, and voice "quality" is terrible.  N.B.  An 
> abnormal shutdown will cause a re-sync.

We've just built a couple of machines based around the MSI P1-102A2M with a 3.0GHz Prescott and 
2Gb RAM. With Hitachi 250Gb SATA hard drives we got a RAID1 sync rate of 55MBps sustained, with 
the CPU usage not going over 5%. It did a mkfs.ext3 in under 4 minutes.

I don't think the  "don't use software RAID on any important machines" mindset is valid any 
longer. Perhaps back in the days of P2s and P3s (kernel 2.2 days), but modern machines have 
enough headroom to not even worry about it, and the software RAID support in the later 2.4 
kernels is very good.

Information on the system is at 
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/server/svr/pro_svr_detail.php?UID=551


> I've had good luck with 3Ware PCI cards.  Stay away from SIIG cards.

We have also had a good experience with the 3ware cards (7506-4 and 7506-8). The only issue we 
have had with them is that for RAID5 they were slower than the software RAID5 on my P3-1GHz! 
For RAID0 or RAID1 they absolutely fly though.

Regards
Darryl


-- 

Darryl Ross
Senior Network Engineer
OEG Australia
Email: darryl at oeg.com.au
Phone: 61 8 81228361

If you want to live up to the whole "There is more than one way to
     do it" slogan, you have to give someone a swiss army chainsaw ...
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