SATA cards? RAID/Non RAID

[Bill McGonigle]

If high performance is a goal and you have the opportunity to spend 
$300, I found the better of the 3Ware cards (9xxx IIRC) to be very fast 
with NCQ SATA II drives (Seagate).  I have identical machines, both 
dual Xeons, one with the lower-end 3Ware card (8xxx?) and standard SATA 
II drives and one with the faster card with SATA II NCQ drives.

For disk-intensive stuff, compiling kernels and such, the faster 
card/drives perform about 75% better than the slower ones.  I was 
surprised to see SCSI-class performance from these 7200RPM drives.  If 
I didn't have its sister with the slower gear I wouldn't have believed 
it was from the disks.

They were setup with Linux Software RAID-1.

-Bill

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Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
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