I saw this on the Dell Linux mailing list.  I did a bit of research and found this is a windows only FAKERAID product.  What I mean by FAKERAID is the card fakes like it is a raid card but all of the work is done on the cpu.  Because of this the driver is proprietary and in this case windows only.  If you want a RAID card make sure it is really a hardware raid card.  If you can’t spend that kind of money use the Linux built in RAID which is much more efficient than any FAKERAID.  Windows also has software raid that’s quite a bit more efficient than this FAKERAID.  If you read the pdf you’ll see that htis is actually a DESKTOP product(the h55 is a desktop chipset form Intel) so it really has no business in servers.  PDF detailing the S Series is here.

Here’s a three part article about SSD’s from an enterprise point of view.  It’s a good series.  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The author has other articles as well here, here, here.

SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

I don’t know why I didn’t blog this last year.  It’s becoming more and more relevant though as folks start diving into SSD’s without realizing the major differences between SSD’s and mechanical hard disks.

I am going to look into this more.  This feature alone would allow storage admins to better utilize storage space.  Right now it’s only available on FreeBSD 8.0 and Solaris.  I may have to fire up a BSD VM on a dedicated drive set to learn how to utilize this technology.  Right now it’s CLI only..no gui(that i know of) to make things “easier”..:)

This thing is FRAID or software raid.  It’s no better than ICHx or any other chipset based “raid” system.   When you see somehting like this:

Dot Hill’s RAIDCore technology enables host-based RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50 directly on motherboard SATA I/O ports, and the same software stack with additional features enabled may also be used for SAS systems that use a built-in or PCIe host adapter-based SAS/SATA chipset.

Also a bit a googling reveals a small thread where I already researched this:

http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/centos@centos.org/1580168.html

The host based is what gives it away.  Anything that is host based puts the processing load on your cpu.  In the case of RAID 5 or 6 that load is high. Never turn this garbage on..use a real RAID controller.

The Search Server Express is one thing i like.  It allows you to have your server index by content everything on your server including PDF’s.  This is one i am going to look into for all of my clients.

This is why when I recommend a product it’s only after it’s been out for a while.  I will not deviate from that again.

Current RAID controllers(real raid controllers not fake ones) are going to start hitting a serious bottleneck before too long.  Once SSD’s start getting into the market it’s not going to be how many requests but how fast you can transfer the data because with SSD’s the request is nearly instantly fulfilled.  SSD”s are going to bring in bandwidth problems fully to the forefront for the first time in decades…let’s hope the storage vendors are ready.

1.  no extra drive letters to manage during system administration and most importantly during system recovery
2.  no disk space loss overhead from partitioning and formatting of partitions
3.  No performance hits from the hard drive(s) having to cross logical boundaries due to the fact that even if you specify things  like exchange and sharepoint onto a different partitions on the same physical disk something is still kept and used often on the c: partition(drive).

I just got an e-mail from carbonite..they ahve given me a full refund and have kept the account active..I can’t trust my data to them so it’s going to be an empty sheel from now on.