I spent some time last month at Intel’s IDF in Beijing. Doing the meet and greet with all the great Chinese customers, resellers, integrators etc. They really are a nice bunch of people and I love Beijing at that time of year (it’s considerably warmer than December). On the Adaptec stand we had all of [...]

The world has gone more than a little crazy in the hard drive department these days. Unless you are a major OEM you are probably having difficulty getting hold of your preferred hard drives to build your server. Nearline Enterprise SATA seem especially hard to come by. This has resulted in many people using just [...]

I spend a lot of my time talking to people about RAID performance numbers. Almost everyone as their own bent on this subject, and many organisations have specific tests they run against hardware to “check” performance. The real problem is … what exactly do the numbers mean and do they relate to your real data. [...]

Quite some time ago Adaptec released a technology called “Hybrid RAID”. This is the combination of an SSD and a spinning disk in a RAID1 or RAID10 array. Initially it was a little unclear as to who would use this technology, with gamers, workstations and entry-level servers seeming like the immediate candidates. However as we [...]

I recently returned from one of my overseas jaunts (country will remain unnamed to protect the innocent) … where I found a general attitude towards making things go fast. That was … use 15K SAS drives. Simple as that. Don’t worry about which RAID card you use, or which RAID type you use for your [...]

Several years ago Adaptec adopted the 5EE RAID level as a standard component of our hardware RAID cards. It seemed like a very good idea – making use of the idle drive that was traditionally a hot spare. However, as I’ve come to know this RAID level better, I’ve been advising people against using it [...]

In days gone by measuring performance was easy – Mb/sec (megabytes per second) was all anyone was really interested in. However measuring performance this way is only suited to systems where you are pushing large amounts of data through the system, not for measuring database or cloud-computing type environments. For database we measure performance in [...]

Have you ever wondered why rebuilds take so long. Maybe it’s because you have 24 x 3tb drives in a RAID6 with 2 failed drives, or maybe it’s because the default task priority is set to low. You can set the default priority by right-clicking on the controller in ASM and changing the value. Note [...]

In days gone by if someone mixed a SAS (fast) drive with a SATA (slow) drive in a mirror us tech guys would generally smile to ourselves, pat the customer comfortingly on the head and make for the nearest exit as quickly as possible muttering under our breath. It did not make sense to mix [...]

Question to the Storage Advisors: We are setting up a small RAID6 on a dedicated server with 5 drives initially (it may be expanded later). The array will store mostly video content and will serve a maximum of 2-3 clients at the same time, reading those videos for playback/editing. The question is what disks to [...]