Wednesday 9 February 2011

Raid Arrays 2

We fitted the best raid array controller we could find to our system yesterday and as expected there was a small improvement on running 4 discs in Raid 0, as the CPU usage also dropped then in actual use the improvement would probably be greater. Another advantage was that it allowed us to fitt an extra drive as the motherboard was limited to 5 drives only.
The connection from the raid card is mini-sas, a raid card with and external mini-sas can be used as a fast  low cost  external raid by using a suitable cable and 4 drives in a midi tower pc case.

A san is probably the preferred solution but it is more expensive and still requires management. Portable Raid Arrays make a low cost scalable entry into this technology and you can always use the drives in a san at a later date.