bristlehog wrote:kithylin wrote:Most likely upgrading it to a dell H700 Sas 6 Gbps pci-e 2.0 card, and look in to 8 x 300GB 6 Gbps drives
H700 controllers are about $90 on ebay, while Perc 6i are about $30. What's there that is worth that extra $60? Are you going to use the cachecade feature?
PERC 6/i are still Sas 3 Gbps controllers, and the onboard cache memory is limted to permantly affixed 256 MB, and while it is a native PCI-Express interface, it's still PCI-E 1.0.
The H700 is a PCI-Express 2.0 controller, supports Sas 6 Gbps, and comes with a 512MB cache module, upgradable to 1GB.
And yes, using the cache module is the entire point and should (and usually is) always used with these cards.
My older PERC 5/i is the first generation pci-e controllers.. and it's not even native pci-e, it's a PCI-X chip, connected across a PCIX-to-PCIE bridge. Even despite all of this, and using the older low-buffer 15K drives, the performance is still faster than any of the mid-range Sata-III SSD's sold today and is only surpassed by the high-end samsung pro series SSD's, once it's up and running. And with Raid-5 it's able to sustain a failure and keep on truckin. The only problem is my PERC 5/i only gets up to Raid-5, using either the H700 or the PERC 6/i would let me have up to Raid-6 and survive double failures.
Also, the larger the cache on the cards, it reduces access times on the array overall, and significantly boosts performance. Across 8 drives in raid-5 I get 7ns access time with my 512MB cache on my 5/i.
EDIT: And all of these controllers will also accept and take normal SATA hard drives, and normal Sata SSD's, and do all the raiding with em. the PERC 5/i are limited to 2TB drives and I don't know what the new ones support. Although using the cheapie SSD's on these things might not last long without TRIM support. I haven't tried it yet myself.