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Date:      Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:29:50 -0500
From:      "Dan Langille" <dan@langille.org>
To:        "Tom Evans" <tevans.uk@googlemail.com>
Cc:        Charles Sprickman <spork@bway.net>, FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, Dan Langille <dan@langille.org>
Subject:   Re: hardware for home use large storage
Message-ID:  <7118399d109e0c1849ae17ffa8ee9c66.squirrel@nyi.unixathome.org>
In-Reply-To: <2e027be01002090716y77213c45pb937e22151a2c238@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <4B6F9A8D.4050907@langille.org> <alpine.OSX.2.00.1002090103520.982@hotlap.local> <2e027be01002090451w2b4506a0ofb5ab55c647540a@mail.gmail.com> <a586d9acd7436f3fdab4f88114309aef.squirrel@nyi.unixathome.org> <2e027be01002090609y28be404dl1bb610d047b15f9b@mail.gmail.com> <f6a0ed0187f2e747696805773154cad9.squirrel@nyi.unixathome.org> <2e027be01002090716y77213c45pb937e22151a2c238@mail.gmail.com>

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On Tue, February 9, 2010 10:16 am, Tom Evans wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, February 9, 2010 9:09 am, Tom Evans wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:45 PM, Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> wrote:
>>> One thing to point out about using a PM like this: you won't get
>>> fantastic bandwidth out of it. For my needs (home storage server),
>>> this really doesn't matter, I just want oodles of online storage, with
>>> redundancy and reliability.
>>
>>
>> A PM?  What's that?
>>
>> Yes, my priority is reliable storage.  Speed is secondary.
>>
>> What bandwidth are you getting?
>>
>
> PM = Port Multiplier
>
> I'm getting disk speed, as I only have one device behind the PM
> currently (just making sure it works properly :). The limits are that
> the link from siis to the PM is SATA (3Gb/s, 375MB/s), and the siis
> sits on a PCIe 1x bus (2Gb/s, 250 MB/s), so the bandwidth from that is
> shared amongst the up-to 5 disks behind the PM.
>
> Writing from /dev/zero to the pool, I get around 120MB/s. Reading from
> the pool, and writing to /dev/null, I get around 170 MB/s.
>

That leads me to conclude that a number of SATA cards is better than a
port multiplier.  But the impression I'm getting is that few of these work
well with FreeBSD.  Which is odd... I thought these cards would merely
present the HDD to the hardware and no diver was required.  As opposed to
RAID cards for which OS-specific drivers are required.


-- 
Dan Langille -- http://langille.org/




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