But that’s alright, as I had a spare server already set up.  A Tyan 2882-D motherboard, two Opteron 246 CPUs, four 1 GB PC2100 DDR ECC RAM, 3ware Escalade 9550SX RAID controller, two 80 GB WD SATA hard drives, four 250 GB Maxtor SATA hard drives, all wrapped in an Antec Titan server case.  Very nice indeed.  The motherboard was a bit old but had what I needed: 133 MHz PCI-X slots for the RAID controller.  Everything else was onboard, but it only has USB 1.1 connections.  The RAM was slow for the CPUs. but I had PC2100 around and didn’t have PC3200 ECC.

The big thing was getting my data off the existing server and migrating it to the new server.  Since the new would be using the old’s IP address network connection was out of the question, plus it would be too slow.  I didn’t have a PATA hard drive big enough to hold my 300 GB of data, so I couldn’t use the native ports on the old server, which was a dual Athlon MP system and pre-SATA.  I had four 500 GB Maxtor SATA hard drives that were going into my backup machine running Windows Home Server, so I pulled one of those and connected it to the old server’s 3ware Escalade 8506 SATA RAID controller.  I’m a big fan of 3ware and they’ve always been generous enough to supply me with controller cards for my ATA RAID testing.

While moving all the files off the degraded RAID array and onto the single 500 GB Maxtor, I installed Small Business Server 2003 R2 onto the new Opteron server.  It was a long process, but it was still done before the file copying.  Thankfully the RAID array didn’t degrade any further.  Once it was completed I hooked to 500 GB Maxtor to a spare port on the 3ware 9550SX and booted the system.  The drive was recognized but I had to designate it as a single drive before the OS would recognize it, something I didn’t have to do with the 8506.  Once recognized on the new system the drive appeared as unpartitioned!  Bells ringing in my head I tried a few things but saw this wasn’t going to work.

Luckily the Tyan 2882-D has an onboard Silicon Image SATA controller, the sort of in-between step vendors took when SATA was introduced.  I enabled it in the BIOS and saw the hard drive was recognized, but now the machine wanted to boot from it instead of the 9550SX.  I popped into the BIOS and checked the boot order: three slots were available, but with the Silicon Image controller enabled the 9550SX was no longer an option.

I quickly disabled the Silicon Image controller and brought the Maxtor 500 GB back to the old server.  Hooking it back up to the 8506 showed a bare unpartitioned drive, so connecting it these RAID controllers was causing some problem.  I pulled the Promise SATA300TX4 from the Windows Home Server and installed it into the old Athlon MP server; it wouldn’t be needed until I could put the 500 GB drive back into the Windows Home Server anyway.  Fired the older server back up and put the drivers in for the SX300TX4.  Started the copying process again, still hoping the degraded array would be fine for just a few more hours.

Data copied I moved the Promise SX300TX4 into the new system but found the same BIOS issue.  Pulling my hair and cursing the system I pulled the motherboard and put in a Tyan 2892 I had on the shelf that I had foolishly purchased on eBay without a need and so left it in the box for a year.  This board had the Nvidia Nforce Professional chipset with native SATA and lots of BIOS boot options.  Copied the data over without issue, finally.

Escalade® 8506 Series

• Supports up to 12 drives with a single PCI card enabling up to 3terabytes of storage (dependent on drive capacity , 2TB per array maximum)
• Supports ATA / 133 / 100 drives with a Parallel-to-Serial Drive Converter
• StorSwitch point-to-point non-blocking architecture
• PCI 2.2 compliant 64-bit / 66MHz bus master
• RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD support (2-port cotrollers support RAID 0,1 and JBOD)
• On-board processor to provide true hardware-based RAID
• Bootable array support for greater fault tolerance
• BIOS set up utility and 3ware Disk Manager (3DM) web-based management software
• Hot-swap and hot-spare capability
• Windows® and Linux® operating systems support

The Escalade 8506 series is 3ware’s second generation Serial ATA ( SATA ) RAID controller. Building from it’s previous generation, this series offers a 64 bit 66MHz PCI interface. On paper that’s about the only improvement over the 8500 series, but benchmarks and deep digging reveal otherwise.

The Escalade 7506 and 8506 series are 64 bit 66 MHz upgrades to their 7500 and 8500 series 64 bit 33 MHz predecessors. Check out our previous coverage of the Escalade 7500-8, and our extensive definitions of ATA RAID.

Serial ATA has really taken off the last year, mostly due to Intel adding native support in it’s 865 and 875 chipsets. Instead of worrying about master and slave settings, each SATA drive has it’s own connection via a slim cable. No jumper worries, small connectors and a slim long cable meant lots of new opportunities for system integrators. Manufacturers scrambled to create SATA products, including ATA RAID controller manufacturers 3ware, Promise, LSI Logic and Highpoint. A simple and easily employed solution was available from Marvell: the 88i8030 Serial ATA Bridge Chip. This translates Parallel ATA to Serial ATA and vice versa. Maxtor and Western Digital use them on their SATA hard drives, and the ATA RAID manufacturers mentioned above use them on their controllers. Take an existing product, add the Marvell 88i8030 and you’re in the SATA business.

For ATA RAID manufacturers this makes a lot of sense, since they can design a solution for Parallel ATA, then use the Marvell 88i8030 and have a Serial ATA solution.

Which brings us to the 3ware Escalade 8506-8. The XOR engine is the 3ware 200-0069-00 in the centre. The ATA controller chips are the same as the previous generation, the 200-0033-00, which can control four drives each. This time around two ISSI memory modules are onboard, maintaining 3ware’s pattern of 1.8 MB hardwired cache. The board layout is clean and relatively compact. The spots for the 12 port model can be seen on the PCB, saving 3ware some manufacturing costs.

3ware has two technologies for ATA RAID: StorSwitch and TwinStor. Here’s a quote from their FAQ, which is pretty self explanatory.

3ware’s StorSwitch replaces shared-bus architectures found in SCSI systems with a dedicated port for each drive, thus maximizing throughput and minimizing latency of the drive subsystem. 3ware’s TwinStor is a RAID level 1 technology that profiles disk drives and optimizes the algorithms for greater performance during reading and writing in a two-disk mirror. TwinStor is designed for applications that are read intensive, such as web serving which utilizes a mixture of small and large data sets with multimedia content.

Opening the box showed the controller, installation guide, software on 3.5” floppy disk and CD-ROM and eight SATA cables. Everything you need, except possibly SATA power adapters. They will run you a few dollars each, but may not be needed if your SATA hard drives also have molex power connections such as the Maxtor drives used for our testing.

I installed the controller, connected the drives and powered up the system. The BIOS setup hasn’t changed from the previous 7500 series, and for that matter doesn’t stray far from any ATA RAID controller. Select your drives and define your array. For RAID 0, 1 and 10 arrays the build time is instant. For RAID 5 arrays you now have a choice of having the array initialized, meaning the entire array is written to for verification, or you can go the instant route. Once into Windows 2000 the driver prompts were followed and the system was up and running after a reboot.

The 3ware Disk Management ( 3DM ) was installed: it’s HTML based and can be accessed from anywhere on your network. A very clean and easy to follow interface, it’s quite easy to use. We were fully installed and away to the races. Lots of nice management features, including email and pager notification. SMART status is displayed as well. When something goes wrong a message flashes on screen to alert the user, as I experienced when one of my drives went into power saving mode all on it’s own.

Let’s talk features. The Escalade 8506 is a 64 bit 66 MHz PCI controller capable of sending 512 MB per second across the PCI bus. It handles RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD ( just a bunch of disks ). Who really spends $500 for JBOD? It supports hot swap and hot spare. Hot swap allows you to remove a failed drive and replace it while the system is running, provided you’re using a drive enclosure. I love drive enclosures but could never spend the money on them: crazy stuff. Hot spare allows you to have an extra drive connected to the controller, not part of the array, that can be added if a drive fails. Both scenarios have the controller rebuilding the array after a drive replacement in real time, so you lose performance but not uptime. All in all every ATA RAID controller should have these features, and most do.

Benchmarking was performed and compared against the Promise FastTrak S150 SX4. While the previous PATA benchmarks showed 3ware with a sizable lead, this time around things are evenly matched. The 8506-8 took most of the benchmarks, but by a very slim margin. 3ware trumps in two areas: 8 and 12 port cards, and a smaller form factor. Otherwise it’s a dead heat.

The 3ware Escalade 8506-8 is an excellent SATA RAID controller, capable of handling eight drives. If your needs lean to eight or twelve drives, 3ware is the way to go.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated.  Originally published November 28th 2003.

]]> http://tech.ebabble.net/3ware-escalade-8506-8/feed 1 http://tech.ebabble.net/3ware-escalade-7500-8 http://tech.ebabble.net/3ware-escalade-7500-8#comments Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:56:55 +0000 Scott VanderPloeg http://www.ebabble.net/reviews/3ware-escalade-7500-8/

The world of ATA RAID is a small one. When I first became interested there were two players: Promise and Highpoint. Slowly I began to hear of 3ware, a company that produced great products, but at a high price. At that time RAID 0 and 1 were about it, and then Promise released the SuperTrak100 and Adaptec released the AAA-UDMA, both touting RAID 5. At that time 3ware released a BIOS and driver update for their Escalade 6000 series that added RAID 5. Of course there was no onboard RAM cache, so performance was lackluster. Then with the second wave of ATA RAID 5 3ware released the Escalade 7000 series and things looked up. We’re looking at the Escalade 7500-8, an ATA RAID controller capable of handling 8 drives in RAID 0,1,5,10 and JBOD ( just a bunch of disks ) in a Windows 2000 environment.

Escalade® 7500 Series

• Supports up to 12 drives with a single PCI card enabling up to 3terabytes of storage
• Ultra ATA/100 interface
• StorSwitch point-to-point non-blocking architecture
• PCI 2.2 compliant 64-bit/33MHz bus master¹
• RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD support²
• Highest performance ATA RAID Controller
• On-board processor to provide true hardware-based RAID
• Bootable array support for greater fault tolerance
• BIOS set up utility and 3ware Disk Manager (3DM®) web-based management software
• Hot-swap and hot-spare capability
• Windows® and Linux® operating systems support

Opening the box revealed: the card, eight 18” ATA 80 wire 40 pin cables, a manual, a driver revision printout, a software envelope containing driver disks and a CD, and four molex “Y” power splitters. I read through the manual to get a feel for the product: it’s a thin photocopy that covers the basics. The manual covers the Escalade 6000 and 7000 series, so the photos in the manual are of 6000 series cards. What I found odd was that the 7.4 driver revision notes were thicker than the manual. Even so, the manual was straight forward and easy going for anyone with RAID experience.

Looking at the actual Escalade 7500-8 adapter, it’s layout is simple and effective. A central 3ware 200-0017-00 chip for RAID calculations and their own StorSwitch technology, two 3ware 200-0033-00 chips to each handle four ATA133 ports. Unfortunately there’s no information regarding individual ASICs on the 3ware website. Two 150 MHz 0.9 MB IDT memory chips for a total of 1.8 MB onboard cache, although I’ve read it online as 2 MB cache available. A few other chips on the board I was unable to identify, plus a four pin LED connector. The board is compact, reasonably short and well laid out.

Installation was straight forward: connected the drives, inserted the card and booted. the Escalade series are 64 bit 33 MHz PCI adapters, allowing for a maximum of 266 MB/sec transfers. Installed the drivers, rebooted and installed 3DM, 3ware Disk Management Utility for Windows. Creating, deleting and repairing RAID arrays is done via the card’s BIOS at boot up, and employs a simple and easy to understand interface. Creating RAID 0, 1 and 10 arrays was immediate: creating RAID 5 arrays took some time as X’s are written to test. This is good feature but takes some time. While it was inconvenient for testing and benchmarking, users should see this as a nice safety feature. As with all RAID products, the Escalade 7500-8 showed as a SCSI controller in Device Manager, and arrays show under disk drives.

Monitoring and reporting is handled via 3DM. This runs as a web server, so access is through your browser and accessed locally or over your network. Again, easy to use and straight forward. Linux users have the CLI, or 3ware Command Line Interface.

In the box I received driver version 7.4, which I installed and began to benchmark with. After a few weeks the board stopped working, so I took advantage of 3ware’s technical support. The system hung at the Escalade 7500-8’s BIOS and wouldn’t go any further. First you register your product online and create a profile, then submit a problem report. Within a day I received an RMA for the board, and since I selected cross shipment by providing my credit card, I received a replacement board within a week. Very nice and smooth technical support.

This time the box contained the 7.53 drivers. I began benchmarking with these, the latest drivers. Performance was ho hum and nothing special. Following Storage Review’s forums on 3ware products revealed users resorting to registry hacks and changing disks from basic to dynamic to get better performance. Then a posting revealed a new driver revision, 7.6, that gave a real performance boost without the “voodoo” tweaking. Redid all benchmarks with the 7.6 driver, firmware and 3DM releases. Doing this revealed the product forces you to update all three items, another nice feature to keep things as 3ware wants it.

Benchmarks don’t lie: the 3ware Escalade 7500-8 with the 7.6 drivers dominated all tests save WinBench99 RAID 5. Sometimes it’s a close call with the FastTrak SX4000, other times a huge margin.

Recommendations are easy: 3ware products give the best ATA RAID performance. If you need to use 8 or 12 drives, they’re the only player in town. The Escalade 7500-4LP is a four drive low profile adapter and fits just about anywhere, another great plus. The only concern is cost: expect to pay 50-100% more for 3ware cards compared to Promise’s FastTrak SX4000. In this case you get what you pay for: the best performance for the highest price.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated. Originally published May 30th 2003.

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