Your SCSI Controller of Choice?

[tmon]

Anyone around here using this one?

http://tinyurl.com/om7y2

[amiga2091]

I am not using that one and I would stay away from it and here is why. That is a hardware RAID/SCSI card meant for servers. More than likely, that is going to use burst mode for your information. For video editing, you want to go with continuous mode and not burst. My two cents.

John

[tmon]

Thanks John.

Let me extend this discussion a bit further. We're shopping for parts this week for two new workstations.

Per NewTek's list of recommended controllers:

SCSI Controller for Video Stripe Set on the 64bit PCI interface: Adaptec 19160, 29160, 39160, 29320, 39320 Ultra 160 or 320 SCSI cards

What is better: A single 39160 or two 39260's? Apples and Oranges....

Or perhaps, I answer my own question by looking at this one: http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?sku=466926&SourceID=k40132

We have two RAID arrays, that are formatted for RAID-3 (redundancy and hot-swappability).

[amiga2091]

The cards that have 160 or 320 on the end of the model just say what SCSI drive is supported. The Ultra 320 being newer than the Ultra 160. I have never used two SCSI cards in the same machine because most SCSI cards have two channels (A/B) anyways. As far as you using Raid 3 goes, you have safety on your side, but not speed. Raid 0 has always been the fastest for RAID configurations, but if one drive dies on a RAID 0, they all die. I hope this has helped.

John

[tmon]

Currently, we get 157 MBs with our RAID3 CAEN Engineering controllers hung off our onboard Supermicro P4DC6+ boards.

Until we can improve the speed and efficiency of our backup system, I have no interest in giving up redundancy in a high pressure production environment at this time. Not only that, but the hot-swap option has saved me on several occasions as well, where a drive began to fail on one of the arrays, and then the RAID was able to go into rebuild mode overnight - saving me the next day....

We are leaning towards the Adaptec 39320A-R....

[tmon]

Another one that I'm looking at:

http://www.attotech.com/Ultra4D.html

http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=603340/skd=1/search=atto+ul4d

[tmon]

We've decided to give the HP Smart Array P600 (PCI-X) a whirl:

http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-Hewlett_Packard_HP_Smart_Array_P600_controller

Two SATA arrays RAID-5, 7 drives per side: 1 hot spare, 1 parity and 5 x 8 = 400 Gig each.

The systems will be hot-rodded with AMD dual cores on a Tyan motherboad.

I'll report sustained throughput numbers later....

[rbartlett]

Forgive me but that link shows a SAS controller description for the P600.
It might also support SATA drives as that is an option in the SAS spec. Just thought it worthwhile to mention this somewhat slight ambiguity.

If there is a "continuous mode" and enough parallelism/cpu-offload in the design, you are potentially helping everyone. Although between $500-$1300, this particular card might not be popular even if the performance does go beyond the anticipated high burst/IOPS level to cater for the high duty cycle requirements of multiple SD/HD video streams.

Keep us posted and if you care to, please do explain the selection rationale behind your decision. For SATA, 3ware and RAIDCore have been popular choices in the past, based initially on reviewers reports on multimedia benchmarks (for what they are worth given the potential for impartiality)

[tmon]

Sorry, that was a lame link:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/smartarrayp600/index.html

This card is definitely over the top for most peoples' budgets, including mine, but not my employer's (not yet anyway, knock on wood). They told me that they want to be ready for any variety of HD flavors, and so the geek squad and I told them we should look for an upgrade. It's a tough situation, as SE isn't quite ready, but in anticipation of that event, I'm hoping the new box will be an improvement off of what we have now, which is RAID-3 (IDE drive arrays off of both of our onboard Supermicro motherboard U160 and U320 controllers-we have two VT workstations). It's been fine for SD work - we've been getting +150MBs, redundancy and a hot-swap on each array (which, btw, has save my tail more than a couple of times).

This sort of thing always feel like a roll of the dice, but given that IDE is on the way out, it seems, and that SAS still seems to have developmental upside, we're thinking the lower cost of SATA drives is the way to go (we can afford more spindles). Yes, there is a greater performance loss as the RAID gets filled up, but we're also upgrading our nearline backup workflow as well (each workstation will have a removeable drive bay and we also have a backup server that is going to be upgraded). So, hopefully we won't get to that performance wall anyway.

Also we're looking to take advantage of the 64 Bit 133 MHz busses on the Tyan Thunder K8SE (S2892).

I betcha SAS controller prices come down quite a bit a year from now. This HP thing is WAAAY expensive IMHO, sort of like buying into a Blue Ray DVD burner to early...but hey, it ain't my money, and the bean counters set the purchasing schedule, not I.

Call it a fun experiment for this community (sustained throughput) "on the house."

Heck on my home system, I only have a budget for my on-board Silicon Image SiI3114 SATA controller!

[tmon]

Turns out that those expensive HP P600 Controllers only work with ProLiant servers. We even tried running them with Windows 2003 Server. No luck with that. Couldn't get the drivers to dance with our Tyan BIOS.....

Fortunately, during the time that we were pursuing the HP P600 option, LSI came out with a new controller that looks very promising:

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid_sas/megaraid_sas_8408e.html

In addition to being able to get 8 ports on one card and moving the controller to a faster, single PCI E 16x slot (the HP's were sitting in two PCI-X 133 MHz slots). Also, the SATA ports come off of the end of the card, rather than the top of the card, as it was with the HP P600's. This was making it difficult to route the SATA cables with our rackmount case.

The LSI megaraid SAS 8408e also has drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit XP.

I'll report back the results as we move forward. Most likely, we'll be running two spindles with hot spares at RAID-5.

[tmon]

Geez Louise. The LSI controller gave us a similar problem to the HP600 controllers in that it did not integrate well with the BIOS - we couldn't consistenly see both controllers, etc., so we finally settled on two of the the Adaptec 4800 SAS controllers. Each sits in the two of the PCI-X 133 MHz slots of our Tyan MOB. The Adaptec controller software is very clean and easy to work with.

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/sas/raid/SAS-4800/

These Adaptec controllers too were not cheap, at close to $800 each. Then, the battery for the backup module alone was around $120! Definitely not a controller option for the low-budget system... two arrays of 8 Seagate 7200 RPM SATA I drives (including hot spares), seen as one by XP Pro....

Using Auto Config as our test app, these are the numbers we've gotten so far, RAID 5EE:

180MB/s with winrtme running.

For the heck of it, we did a RAID-0 test too (we might go to RAID-0 if HD work starts coming in):

228 MB/s with winrtme running.

FYI:

MOB:
http://www.tyan.com/PRODUCTS/html/thunderk8se.html

Case:
http://www.circotech.com/rm-3390m-3u-sata-multilane-storage-server-case-with-16-multilane-sata-removable-hotswap-tray-ghi-390.html

[tmon]

For those of you, like me who was thinking, "we paid how much for that performance?!?"

Ha-ha-ha...something was going wrong with our stripe (probably messing around too much while the controllers were striping). We re-striped again RAID 5EE and just let the controllers do their thing to completion of the stripe before doing anything else...

With winrtme running, we are now hitting 340-371 MB/s.

Now, that's more like it.

$$$$

[PIZAZZ]

Nice work Taiji.

Sometimes I feel so alone pushing the bleeding edge. Glad to see someone else is a crazy as us. :)

[tmon]

Come on, PIZAZZ-man, no one is as crazy as you with your portable VT VJ setups, etc....well maybe Dan "Mr. AMD" Hong and Co.....I can only aspire to reach that level of madness. And Eric Pratt helped inspire me with the SATA RAID numbers he was getting a while back, which I thought were pretty whack when I first saw them - and look at that wild virtual set stuff he's doing! Tasa, he's beyond nuts...he drinks beer in two-handed fashion and has no room for nuts, yuk, yuk, yuk.

Almost everyone is a bit crazy around here. Isn't NewTek's existence in San Antonio just another way of offsetting social spending cutbacks in mental health care facilities? For crying out loud, they have people that have green hair working there, and they support hardware you bought from them a gazillion years ago - now that's crazy! Come on, all these people thumbing their noses at the $$ big boys and building systems with 4-5 times better performance at 1/4th the cost? No need to feel alone in your bleeding!

BTW, adding to my nutzoness, I've put an AJA Xena card in the PCI 2.3 bus.
I'll just cross my fingers that it might work for HD I/O after SpeedEdit is given birth.

;)

[tmon]

In case anyone here is interested....

Test results with this new system, are providing 8 streams of uncompressed video with Background Rendering turned off.

It seems the system really enjoys the CPU overhead when you have keyframe positioning and other control tree data in the clips....pretty cool seeing all four CPUs working in Task Manager...haven't tried LW3D renders yet.

[tmon]

There have been updates to the TYAN mob bios and also firmware upgrades to the HP controller cards since my last posting. Also we changed a physical jumper setting so we are now getting 133MHz off of the PCI-X slots they are sitting in (we had it set to 100MHz before).

Auto Config, with winrtme running, consistently now shows 350-362MB/s.

[tmon]

Also, we had to change cases as there was insufficient cooling for the controller cards in the first one that we tried. This thing is noisy as all heck, but there is tremendous airflow:

http://www.aicipc.com/productDetail_galley.asp?catID=38&id=165