3Ware SideCar
3Ware SideCar
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 7, Issue 8 - November/December 2007
The SideCar represents a new direction for RAID controller maestros 3Ware, as
this desktop-appliance aims to deliver a pile of high-performance direct
attached storage to power-hungry users. The solution offers a quartet of SATA
hard disks in hot-swap carriers and the kit comes with one of 3Ware's 9650SE PCI-Express
SATA/3Gbps RAID controller cards. This is equipped with 128MB of DDR2 embedded
cache memory, which can be upgraded with an optional battery backup pack.
The controller supports the usual RAID suspects, so you'll find full
hardware-managed RAID-0, -1, -10, -5 and JBOD arrays on the menu. It supports
hot-swap, so drives can be easily replaced, in the event of a failure; and, if
you add more drives to the enclosure, then existing arrays can be expanded into
the new space, on the fly. The kit includes a two-metre cable and, being the
multi-lane variety, that means each drive gets its own dedicated channel to the
controller card.
Although Windows support was added more recently, the Macintosh market has
always been the SideCar's primary target, so you'll find it exhibits the same
uncompromising built quality and design.
The system supplied for review came with a quartet of 150GB Western Digital
Raptor drives, which are mounted in very solid aluminium carriers, each with a
large drive status LED next to the handle that also provides early warnings, if
errors have been detected. The chassis incorporates a single cooling fan at the
rear, but we found overall noise levels to be low enough to make the SideCar
almost unobtrusive on the desktop.
For testing, we opted to install the RAID card in a Supermicro dual 3GHz Xeon
5160 server, running Windows Server 2003 R2, where we had no problems loading
the relevant drivers. Note that, at the time of review, 3Ware had not
implemented full support for Windows Vista.
You have a couple of options for RAID array creation, as you can configure the
card using its BIOS menu, which provides easy access to all the features. From
here, you can create, delete, modify or rebuild arrays and add hot-standby
drives to existing arrays.
To test performance, we left the appliance in its default quad-drive RAID-5
array and used the Iometer utility, configured with four disk workers and 64KB
transfer request sizes. The SideCard certainly impresses in the speed stakes, as
we saw Iometer reporting a swift 152MB/sec for 100% read operations, while write
operations returned an equally healthy 73MB/sec.
This was a significant improvement over the server's local storage, as we ran
Iometer on a single Western Digital Raptor SATA hard disk, being used as a basic
data drive, and this returned 108MB/sec and 55MB/sec read and write speeds.
General management and monitoring tools are particularly good, as the RAID card
also comes with 3Ware's 3DM2 utility, which allows the controller and associated
drives to be managed locally and remotely, using a browser over secure HTTPS
sessions.
A feature often missing from these types of storage solutions is enclosure
management, but 3Ware has this covered, as the controller and appliance are also
linked by a separate cable. This allows 3DM2 to show information about the fan
status and internal temperatures, and also provides an option to identify a
particular drive by flashing the status LED on its carrier.
The SideCar delivers a fine combination of storage capacity and fault tolerance,
and is particularly easy to install and manage.
Price also compares favourably with standard NAS appliances, but these don't
even come close to it for sheer performance, making this a top choice for
Macintosh or Windows users, running demanding applications.
Product: SideCar
Supplier: 3Ware
Tel: 0161 232 6360
Price: reduction to be announced
Web site: www.3ware.com
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