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 Post subject: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 2:27 pm 
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Joined: Tue Nov 13, 2007 4:37 pm
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Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
Evening all,

Looking to improve on of my nas servers that is used to store inventor 2014 cad drawings and try to improve the data throughput as the cad files tend to be massive

looking at this card running as Raid 10 (mirroring and striping)

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/260741843796? ... 1438.l2649

with these drives

http://www.cclonline.com/product/89647/ ... -/HDD1551/

The read speed of the drive on western dig spec sheet shows 106 Mb/sec maximum

if 4 of these drives where used as raid 10 what sort of data rate would i be looking at ? 400 Mb ish ??

The raid card uses laptop ddr2 ram so if i increased to 1gig (the maximum) would there be any real gains in performance in the write ?? or would the ram in the machine suffice (2 gig) as i know that in raid 10 the write speed is (n/2)*No of drives


Can someone please advise

Thanks

Steve


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 5:08 pm 
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Location: Up State NY in the USA!!!!
Considering that you are getting about the max one can expect from a gig E connection your options are limited. You need to upgrade the NIC and the switch to 10gig to handle the throughput of RAID10. This also means 10gig NICs in the clients. The limit of the bus on the server will then come into play so a high performance computer is going to become a necessity.

Mike


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 3:08 am 
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Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
Cheers for that mike

could i use raid 0 instead ? what could i expect from that

Does naslite support dual nic's yet ? as looking through the hardware resource list there is some HP nic's listed that are dual and quad port devices , or will only one port work ?

Could go fiber to switch ?

or am i stuffed on this one ?

Steve


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 9:24 am 
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Location: Up State NY in the USA!!!!
They don't support dual NICs and I suspect that they likely won't in the future. As far as adding a fiber NIC it will not buy you any performance increase.

You are simply not going to get any real increase from your present setup with the limit of the gigabit link. You would have to go to the likes of 10gig ethernet or 4 gig fibre Channel to fix your problem. No matter what RAID you are using wont matter if you can't push the data through the link, which is your problem in this case.

What you are trying to do is likely not going to go well since it is kind of counter to what NASLite is designed to function as. To get the performance you are looking for you will probably need to find another solution or roll your own.

Mike


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 11:37 am 
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Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
Ok mike thanks for you advise on this one

Steve


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 9:07 pm 
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Location: Up State NY in the USA!!!!
Sorry to be the barer of the bad news...

The card you have there is a ripper and should get you to the 200MB/second area with the right drives in the real world and maybe even more. Supposedly they are able to get to 380MB/sec on sequential transfers but I would expect that you would need to do a fair bit of tuning of the Array. The drives on the other hand are not the right ones. WD blue drives are not intended to be used in RAID arrays and in fact WD will void the warranty on you if you do. You have to have the WD red drives which are designed to be run in a RAID array and are considered near line storage drives. Another issue you are going to have with the WD drives is that they are "advanced format" and will not be recognized by the RAID card you have there counter to what the yahoos at WD tech support tell you. Ask me how I know this... I have three of their 3TB red drives and they all come up as 746GB on the 9550 card (latest firmware too) I have in a server I am building. Seagate NS series drives on the other hand are all good and come up as they are. So I will be buying the Seagate near line RAID rated drives as I need to add storage to the array.

If you are serious about performance then you will need to look at some real hardware. One way to get the speed you are looking for is to go with a 4Gb FC-AL array like a Xyratex F5402E with the FC-AL RAID card built in. Add in a cheap 8 port FC-AL switch and a FC-AL card to your clients and you will have a fast storage array capable of pushing big numbers. Fully populated with drives you should easily get 400MB/second.

Realistically expect to spend in excess of $2,500.00 USD to get all the parts needed and a fair bit of time setting it all up. It will run like a raped ape though it won't be a Lustre file system by any stretch though.

Mike


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Thu Sep 26, 2013 8:00 am 
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Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
cheers mike for advise,

I have purchased a raid card to have a play dam thing doesn't show up in bios ? :?

Motherboard is a foxconn G31mx

Any ideas

Steve


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Thu Sep 26, 2013 6:12 pm 
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Default the BIOS and give it another go. Also disable all the on board devices not needed like the serial and parallel ports as well as the sound card. If that doesn't work I would try moving the card to a different slot.

What kind and model of RAID card did you get?

Mike


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Fri Sep 27, 2013 7:07 am 
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Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
Hi Mike

Got this one

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/260741843796? ... 1438.l2649

Just to play and see what what it does etc :lol:

Steve

Edit

Noticed that D14 LED flashing about once per second ( the one next to the header for the port activity )
Cannot find reference to this in the manuel


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Fri Sep 27, 2013 5:59 pm 
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Location: Up State NY in the USA!!!!
And it won't... It is a RAID card with its own processor etc. and BIOS. There is prompt at boot that tells you to press ALT + 3 to get the RAID card BIOS. From there you can build an array, then it can be formatted in NASLite after the machine boots.

Mike


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sat Sep 28, 2013 12:49 am 
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Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
Hi mike ,

looking at this manuel page 34 it says to watch for the the screen atttached , i dont see it :(

http://www.3ware.com/support/UserDocs/I ... .2.1.1.pdf

i have reset the bios and turned everything unused off like you suggested - still cannot see the message,
but i can see it listed in the IRQ list , have tried to run naslite , naslite picks it up and loads a driver for it but i geuss as the card not set up thats why there are no drives listed.


Steve


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sat Sep 28, 2013 4:42 am 
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Hit ALT 3 as soon as the computer starts booting and keep hitting it (even if you see nothing). Maybe the message goes-by too fast or too soon.

Robby


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sat Sep 28, 2013 5:18 am 
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Joined: Sun May 27, 2007 5:38 pm
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Location: gods own country
adding to Robby's comment above - are you using a USB keyboard - for some reason they are not always seen at bootup - try an 'old' ps2 one


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Sat Sep 28, 2013 11:54 am 
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Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
cheers will give it a go

Steve


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 Post subject: Re: Raid questions
PostPosted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 7:40 am 
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Joined: Tue Nov 13, 2007 4:37 pm
Posts: 160
Location: Leeds, West yorkshire, uk
still not having any luck :( got a ps2 keyboard on now
have rest bios turned all unused stuff off
even tried installing a new link raid card into same slot to test if slot works - ok


any ideas

Steve :? :?


edit

think there maybe an issue with my mother board pci slot if some one can have a look and double check for me ?

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/ProductDe ... -us0000452


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