RAID Controller Review

[darkmark327]

I recently purchased a SR3100 from Netcell; I am quite pleased with it, and the company seems to have little exposure, so I figured I'd write a little review here. If you're looking for the speed of RAID 0 with data security, look no further.

I first read about Netcell's parallel ATA version on Tom's Hardware. My data is important to me, but I also desired speed, and this seemed to be the perfect solution, as I had previously been running RAID 1, and then RAID 0 with backups to my 120 GB drive which then quickly began to fill up. The testing on Tom's hardware showed it to very much live up to its claims of offering RAID 0 performance with RAID 5 reliability, and my experience has too.

Setup:

Setting up the controller was obviously simple; it is a 3 port controller, and comes with 3 Serial ATA cables. I previously had 2 cables from my motherboard, and had recently ordered a 3rd drive from ZipZoomFly.com (free 2nd day air rules) which only sells bare drives, and thus wouldn't come with a cable. I wasn't sure if they'd send cables or whether I'd have to buy one. I was pleased that they did.

The packaging was nothing special, but I really don't care too much; I find practicality to be more valuable than flashy designs. It was in a plain white box with a Netcell label on it, opening it up revealed a small brown box with the card in an anti-static bag, a small plastic bag with the cables, the manual, and the driver CD.

The card is of the 66-MHz PCI variety. Despite popular belief to the contrary, it will work flawlessly in your normal PCI-33 slots. The only problem lies with bandwidth (though this applies to any controller). The PCI bus only has 133 MB/s of bandwidth, and it is quite quickly used up. Though it works fine, the read rate is limited by this ceiling as I will show you in the benchmarks.

The only slight issue I had was getting my case's HD light to work; there is a 4-pin header right above the card's own activity light; I took a chance and hooked my case's HD LED header to the right of that and surprisingly it seems to have worked.

Features:

The BIOS is intuitive enough; there are options to create and manage arrays of course. A few small things have not yet been implemented, but I never encountered any obstacles to using the card. Make sure you dont' disable the int13 BIOS extension option or the expansion BIOS options if you're booting from the card or you won't be able to boot. That warning was not adequately provided in my opinion (no, I didn't learn from experience :p). There is also a Windows app too; it contains basically the same features, but can also send various alerts in the case of an array problem.

My only slight complaint is that it takes a while to intialize as compared with my onboard RAID. Oh and one very handy thing is that it uses the Windows built in ATA drivers so NO F6 DISK IS NEEDED for windows setup! Very handy since I don't have a floppy drive. The downside is a random "dummy disk" is detected on almost every startup. Annoying, but not really a problem (but it does cause some issues, as I will mention below).

Also, there are no migration options as of yet.

Performance:

I had two 250GB Hitachi Deskstars in my system in RAID 0 on my ICH5R; naturally they were very quick, second only to Raptors basically. Moving to the RAID XL config has not diminished the performance at all as far as I can tell (except for the PCI ceiling, which did not apply to the Southbridge RAID). You can see HDTach graphs for the onboard RAID and RAID XL below. As you can also see, CPU usage is practically nothing. Unfortunately I don't have any write benchmarks saved from the ICH5R, but I will show a screenshot of ATTO for the RAID XL. Windows XP installed in about 20 minutes.

Support:

Unfortunately, the card is not without issues. The only problems I've encountered relate to power management. Originally, neither standby nor hibernate worked. There is a knowledge base article patch, which doesn't show up in Windows Update that the card warns you to install to prevent data loss (here). After installing that, Hibernate worked (although it takes a long while to resume) and S1 suspend worked. S3 did not. BSODs would result, or the system would lock up. I suspect it has to do with the redetection problem above, since I find messages like this in the event log when returning from hibernation: "The device ' NetCell RAM Disk /0 u]p(don't use)' (IDE\Disk_NetCell_RAM_Disk_/0_u]p(don't_use)_________\4152204d69446b736428206f6f6e207473752965) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal." I suspect that is why S3 doesn't work. Anyway I emailed their tech support, and was very pleased with their response time and eagerness to help. I emailed them of my problem and was responded to very quickly. I will enumerate my contacts below:

Thursday, 8 PM: I write "Since I installed a syncraid 3100 in my PC, suspend has stopped working. The computer either hangs or shows STOP errors when I attempt to resume."

The next morning when Iwake up I find they responded late that night: Someone responds to me "Mark,

Thanks for using SR3100, we do appreciate your business.

I will look into this problem tomorrow and get back to you with my observation. I assume you are using Windows XP?

Thanks"

I respond the following morning when I wake up: "Correct, with SP1a and the Q331958 installed. S1 works OK, but S3 (STR) does not."

When I get home from work, they have written: "Mark,

First of all, thanks for using a SyncRAID card. We appreciate your business!

I have a few questions to help me understand the problem you are seeing and to replicate it in our lab. First of all, can you give me more information about your setup, including motherboard, graphics card, processor, any other high end hardware you may have plugged into the PCI bus, what kind of drives are attached to the SyncRAID card, and what OS you are using (including how recently updated). Second, can you tell me if you are using the 3100 as a boot device, or if you have another boot drive attached to the mobo. Third, can you tell me what you mean by suspend? Are you referring to the Standby or Hibernate function in Windows? As soon as you can reply to these questions, I will start looking in more detail at your issue. Please feel free to call me directly @ (xxx) xxx-xxxx as well."

I respond "My setup is as follows:

Intel D875PBZ Socket 478 Motherboard

P4 3.2C

2x512 PC3200 Corsair XMS

ATI Radeon AIW 9800 Pro

SyncRAID 3100 w/ 3x Hitachi 7K250 250 GB SATA

SB Audigy Gamer

1x 120GB WD1200JB 120 GB Primary Master

NEC DVD-ROM Secondary Master

Plextor 12x10x32 CD-RW Secondary Slave

I?m using XP Pro SP1a, freshly installed (when I moved from 2x250 GB on the motherboard?s built in RAID 0 to the XL), with the Q331958 patch installed. I?m using the XL as my boot device, and Hibernate functions correctly (albeit much more slowly) but suspend does not anymore (it had worked fine). Upon resuming suspend, I?ve noticed a few things happen: either a BSOD (so far I?ve seen 0x0000007A and 0x00000077 KERNEL_ stuff) or one time I did get to the desktop (but it was blank and there was no taskbar) but the system did not respond and the LED on the Syncraid was blinking at a constant interval. Thanks for the quick support. "

Later that night, they respond: "Mark,

We have just confirmed that the standby problem only occurs on our SATA cards (that is what you have), it works fine with PATA cards. We can now debug and hopefully fix this issue soon. Will keep you posted.

Thanks for your cooperation."

So although it seems I have lost the ability to use S3, they were very fast and helpful in diagnosing the problem, and since it only applies to SATA and PATA works fine I suspect it will be fixed at some point. Note that they never sent any annoying auto-responders or dummy tech support ("Is it plugged in properly, have you installed the drivers", etc...although there are no drivers t;)install ;) )

Verdict:

The RAIDXL system works very well and performs very well. I now can be confident that a hard drive loss will not result in loss of data, and I still retain high performance. The only problem is the price. The SR3100 was $230USD; it is actually less expensive to buy two drives and use RAID 0+1 on your motherboard if you have it, rather than buying a 3rd drive and a controller. For the moment, suspend is broken, but S1 and Hibernate still work. Overall I'm very satisfied.

As you can see in the HDTach benchmark, the performance difference for reading is purely due to the PCI bus. I plan on buying a Supermicro P4SCT to replace my current motherboard; it is pretty much the only Socket 478 I875 motherboard with PCI-66 support.

Edited July 18, 2004 by darkmark327

[darkmark327]

As for ATTO, I already have the array partitioned, so I ran it on S:\ a 65 GB partition, and S:\ a 250 GB partition. There is also D:\ a 150 GB partition but I left that out.

First, C:\

I ran with queue length 4, queue length 10, and overlapped disabled. 4 & 10 were basically the same, I have superimposed overlapped over 10 here:

[darkmark327]

Since you can see above that the performance is pretty much the same regardless of queue depth, here is C:\ superimposed on S:\, so you can see the slight difference in the two partitions.