5302 vs 5i Plus

[Edwin Nduriri]

Does anyone have any detailed info on Smart Array controller performance?
I am looking at the 5302 vs 5i Plus.

The 5302 should have higher performance, but we have long standardized on buying those controllers on the DL580 G1 servers, with or without external DASD. One of the benefits was having battery backup cache.

However, the new DL580 G2 comes with a 5i Plus w/ BBC. My pitch is that this controller should be more than adequate to handle OS I/O, i.e. RAID1 w/ spare (3 drives total).
To expand the storage on the G2, you have to go to a 5300 series controller or similar for external DASD or HBAs for SAN attachment.
I feel that it is not necessary to buy a 5300 series controller if all I need it for is for internal storage for the OS.

What are your thought on this?

Thanks
Edwin

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
We have some DL380R G3 X2800x2 servers with the 5i+ controller for OS disks ( Raid 1,NetWare 6 and W2000). The performance is more then enough for this task. I have done some backup performance tests on this configuration and a LTO drive connected to the same controller and it was no problem to reach 30MB/s throughput with medium-sized files.