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Hardware Compatibility
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Topic starter
This thread is for all SoftRAID users to share their experience. We find a lot of users are asking for hardware recommendations.
Feel free to add your comments and experiences.
Below is the kind of information that other users will find valuable:
• What brands/sizes hard drives have you used with SoftRAID? Did any not work for you? (was it related to your other hardware, or were your drives DOA, or fail during use?)
• What kinds of buses have you connected disks with?
(USB 2/3, Thunderbolt, eSATA, FireWire, SAS)
• What brand and type enclosures have you used? What about "multi-function" enclosures with RAID and JBOD? With both USB and eSATA/Thunderbolt/Firewire?
• What has worked successfully? Would you recommend this hardware to others?
• What has not worked for you? how did you resolve the issues?
Posted : 18/08/2016 4:15 pm
Here is my experience:
MacPro4,1 (early 2009)
Two Apricorn Velocity Duo x2 PCI cards, in 16X slots
Four Intel S3500 800GB SATA SSDs, two on each PCI card
One Startech 10Gbit Ethernet card
Boot disk is Intel S3700 on internal SATA
OS 10.11 El Capitan. Usage is fileserver (mostly large images)
Positive:
If I make a RAID-0 I get around 1200MB/sec both read and write. That is very decent for a 2009 rig.
Negative:
TRIM does not work correctly on El Capitan. It did on Yosemite. I had to disable it. This is not good at all.
RAID-5 gives me around 900MB/sec read, but only 600MB/sec write. I think this penalty is way too high!
(The Intel drives does not use Sandforce controller, but Intels own.)
Posted : 08/12/2016 8:59 am
Topic starter
We obviously have no influence on TRIM, but I am interested to hear that TRIM works different on 10.11 than 10.10. What was the problem you saw?
RAID 5 performance on the 2009 Mac Pro is going to have some limitations as the CPU's on the Mac Pro are much slower than modern Macs, for RAID calculations.
How many cores are on your machine?
Posted : 08/12/2016 4:22 pm
Can we mix and match disks with varying physical and logical sector size (advanced formats)? Say I'm making a 6 disk RAID5 with 4 disks of 512/512 (not AF), 1 disk of 4096/512 (AF) and 1 disk of 4096/4096 (AF), will this outright not work or should I expect stability/performance hits?
Posted : 20/02/2018 5:59 pm
Topic starter
We have tested either or, but not a mix.
I am not sure what will happen without testing it. It should work, but there will likely be a performance hit.
Posted : 20/02/2018 7:26 pm
We have tested either or, but not a mix.
I am not sure what will happen without testing it. It should work, but there will likely be a performance hit.
For my immediate purposes, I'm attempting to mix 512e with 512n. From what I've read, the potential performance hit comes from improper partition alignment ( https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1437838&p=9021652#post9021652). Does SoftRAID handle partition alignment already (assuming all drives are freshly initialized)?
Posted : 21/02/2018 12:34 am
Topic starter
I know for certain we handle alignment when all disks are the same. When the disks are different, I am not sure. When I find out, I can repost.
Posted : 21/02/2018 12:47 pm
