Atto R680

[Steve Modica]

6gb SATA supports a multiplexing option that will let us handle 2 3Gb drives on a single 6Gb channel. That’s important to getting the benefits. If you have a 3Gb expander now, you won’t get that.
We’ve also found that the 6Gb Atto card (which is a completely different chipset from the 380 card) requires different numbers to perform the way we want.

I would not suggest upgrading to that card. I think Bob is right that a 380 would be sufficient for what you have as a “better” replacement controller.

We have 6Gb stuff that does all the right multiplexing if you want to find out more about that.
Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Jim Curtis]

Hi Steve,
If you followed my thread, you’ll find that I’m still a babe in the woods about RAID. If I knew then what I knew now, I would have posted here before I bought anything RAID-related.

Anyway, I already have the R680 card, and it’s been working fine for a few months. I tried to return it to Backupworks in exchange for the R380 (after reading Bob’s advice), but my sales rep assured me, saying that he was getting his info direct from ATTO, that the R680 would give me equal performance. He suggested I keep the R680, which I did.

I’m getting read/writes in the 700 MBs range, depending on the AJA Hardware Test, with 8 2TB Seagate Constellation SAS drives in RAID 5. This is with a 3Gbs chassis. (I wasn’t getting much more than 500-600 with my old SATA drives and the HPT RR3522 card.)

I’d been corresponding with an engineer from ARECA about their 6Gbs chassis – one of the only desktop RAID chassis on the market, if you can find one – and he told me that even with a 6Gbs chassis, I shouldn’t expect much faster read/writes at RAID 5.

Do you have any thoughts on that statement?

Jim Curtis
jamesphilipcurtis.com

MacPro (Harpertown-Early 2008) 2×4 3GHz; 32G RAM all the same brand; 10.6.3; QT 7.6.6; FCS3; Kona LHi in PCI slot 3 (8.0.1); Primary display: 30″ ACD; Secondary: HP LP2480zx DreamColor (A) via AJA HDP2 SDI to HDMI converter and (B) DVI from MacPro.

[Steve Modica]

I think you are using this direct attach so you are probably doing OK. We focus on shared environments where many threads will hit the raid causing performance and latency drop offs.

You can definitely get better than 700MB/sec through that card. We’re getting those numbers with shared loads in realtime, so I would expect 1.5GB/sec with just raw bandwidth.

The Aja test isn’t really a good measure since it uses a relatively small IO size. FCP uses Asynchronous IO and much larger IOs.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Hai au Bui]

The good news is that it suits better your needs. And what’s exciting is that it will eventually get better when a proper, affordable and reliable 6Gb chasis will come out in 2011, hopefully.

I also have a ProAvio E8 MS chasis and upgraded to an ATTO R680, even thought I knew I wasnt going to use it at his full capacity at first. But I changed from a ARECA ARC-1680 because one of my friend encounter a problem with a the same card. He had corrupted data, and got close to none support from Areca. He was left by himself. So I decided to switch to ATTO that is thought a step above ARECA, for a better peace of mind. In that regard, and in yours also related to your fear of HPT, I now sleep better. And don’t mind paying a little premium for it.

I’ve have my ATTO R680 in a MacPro 12-Core 2.66, and it works fine for me.
I have 5x Seagate SAS 2TB 7200rpm in RAID6 for DATA, and 3x Seagate SAS 600GB 15000rpm in RAID0 for BOOT. With a RamDisk I’ve managed to reach about 300Mo/s read and write from my DATA raidset, and 450Mo/s read and write from my BOOT raidset.
https://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-HowToUseARAMDisk.html

I would strongly advise that you use RAID6 for better protection, particularly when a drive fails. In RAID5, you are left unprotected during the restore process (even with a hot spare) that can take several hours to complete and not mentionning slowing down your process. RAID6, even better RAID6+spare, will keep your protected and still up and running event if one hard drive fails, and furthermore you don’t die even if two fails.
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/raid-5-theory-reality/983

I bought a ATTO R680 for peace of mind, and I got that. I took the R680 rather than the R380 because it could eventually give me better performance in the future for a little extra. I’m very happy that the R680 works with my ProAvio, a hassle less.

The ARC-8040 looks awsome. But I wouldn’t mind waiting a bit more, and pay a little bit more, for a ATTO equivalent.

[Hai au Bui]

“Stardom recently released a true 6 gigabit per second enclosure, the SOHOTANK ST8-U5.”
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Raidon/ST8U5/
https://www.barefeats.com/wst10d.html

[Jim Curtis]

Well you got me all excited for a few minutes, but as I read their site spex and the PDFs including disk compatibility chart, it appears this is a 3Gbs box that only takes 3Gbs drives.

They brag about their own HBA achieving “a stunning” 400 MBs with RAID 0. That’s not really very impressive.

Steve recently pointed out that their 6Gbs products are seeing 1.5 Gbs read/writes. That is impressive.

I’d never heard of this company, but the enclosure looks well made. I has three fans, which is a nice touch. It appears they’re HQ’ed and manufactured in Taiwan. They have one distributor in CA. So, I’d have concerns about support. I’ll keep an eye on them. Thanks for bringing them to our attention. They do claim this box is for video.

Jim Curtis
jamesphilipcurtis.com

MacPro (Harpertown-Early 2008) 2×4 3GHz; 32G RAM all the same brand; 10.6.3; QT 7.6.6; FCS3; Kona LHi in PCI slot 3 (8.0.1); Primary display: 30″ ACD; Secondary: HP LP2480zx DreamColor (A) via AJA HDP2 SDI to HDMI converter and (B) DVI from MacPro.

[Chad Gilmour]

Hey guys, slightly off subject, but it is in regards to the ATTO R680.

As I’m sure guys may be aware, the card runs super hot and the driver forces the Mac Pro fans to be on full tilt 24/7. ATTO showed me how to return control to the Mac, but warned it’d probably burn the card eventually. Obviously this isn’t a good solution, so I’m wondering if putting a PCI fan card in above the Raid card would cool it enough to allow me to return control to the Mac, or if there is another option I should be aware of?

This is the fan I am looking at: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835425004&cm_re=pci_card_fan-_-35-425-004-_-Product

know Bob said in another form about the R380 that it’s loud and we need to deal with it, well this is me trying to deal with it. Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

I’m running 2×2.26 Quad (MacPro4,1) OSX 10.6.2

Thanks!

Chad G.

[John Davidson]

Just a little update.

We are finally tossing our HPT card for an R680 in an EB8MS chassis and are using the recommended 6Gb/s 3Tb Hitachi drives from the Enhance Tech site. According to ProAvio we should get sustained 900Mb/s speeds with this configuration.

We have a second system with a R380 / EB8MS / 8 1Tb WD drives. It gets speeds of around 400Mb/s avg. We will be shuffling around a few things this week, but i’ll try to report what we find.

Many thanks to the Enhance Tech and ATTO support guys for being so responsive to my questions.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Chad Gilmour]

FYI, in response to my post if anyone is looking for a similar fix to the overheating card, we ended up using a card slot above to hold a fan directly over the chip and pulled power from an empty hard drive bay, it actually kept cooler than when the mac fans were running full on.