Which disk controllers work best with Linux?

[John Hodrien]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2010, Adam Nielsen wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> After a recent fire in one of our data centres, it's time to go
> shopping.  As I've had many problems in the past trying to get
> half-decent performance out of the drive controllers in Dell servers,
> I'd like to know what others' experiences are.
>
> I don't need anything spectacular, but I'd like to have a dozen or so
> people able to load their Word docs at the same time without it grinding
> to a halt.  Annoyingly I can get great performance out of Dell desktop
> PCs with the same kernel version, just not out of the servers I've had
> in the past.
>
> Mostly this seems to be caused by the disks being connected to an awful
> hardware RAID controller, but I don't think Dell offer any servers using
> the same onboard Intel SATA controllers that work really well on desktop
> PCs.  Haven't yet had a server with SAS disks, but as they all go
> through a hardware RAID controller I'm a little dubious...
>
> So any suggestions/experience would be much appreciated!

You hadn't previously used a Dell CERC SATA controller?  If so, you've seen as
bad as it gets.

jh