Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

[Bryan J. Smith]

Bill Broadley <bill at cse.ucdavis.edu> wrote:
> I just talked to Maurice offline.  There are various pci-e
> solutions (JBOD, FRAID, and real RAID) that are (and have
been)
> available. I've been building 16 disk servers out of the
> Areca-1260.
> The 1260 has:
> * x8 pci-e bus (2GB/sec + 2GB/sec)

FYI, I was under the impression that each x1 channel is
0.125GBps bi-directional (0.25GBps effective), meaning an x8
is 1.0GBps bi-directional (2.0GBps effective).

> * 256MB dimm
> * Intel RAID 6 engine (forget the part number)

IOP332 or IOP333 -- 400+MHz X-Scale (superscalar ARM).

They kick serious @$$ and prevent all that redundant load
going back and forth from I/O to memory to CPU back to memory
and down I/O again, just to do a XOR calculation (the XOR
itself is nothing, the CPU can do them quickly).  If you're
building a system that is a dedicated storage device, that's
one thing, and you use software RAID -- but if you're
building a server that is servicing clients, it's nice to
keep the storage processing from hogging I/O that could be
used for network and other services.

Intel is planning to start putting the XScale logic right in
the southbridge chips on its server solutions, so then
OS-based RAID (leveraging the southbridge) would be far more
viable.

> * Optional battery backup
> * Network interface for management
> * Can manage i2c enclosures
> I'm pretty happy with it, I have 2 16 * 400GB disk servers,
> and a few other folks I know have them (at least one
16*500GB).

How are the Linux drivers and user-space support?  I've never
used the Areca so I'm very interested.  My use of 3Ware
7000/8000 series is more about the proven drivers and
user-space support.  I'd be happy to find a PCIe solution
that is equal to the 3Ware for PCI-64/X.

> One feature I particularly like is you can upgrade the BIOS
> from a webbrowser.
> The driver has been in the linux kernel for awhile, some
> helpful folks even run a yum repository with the areca
driver
> support.

Good to know.  But how is the user-space support?



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