StarWind Software

I’ve been working on setting up a test lab to test Starwind’s high availability features, but I have been having a lot of difficulty with my choices of hardware. I’m curious to see what hardware others are using for either their test or production environments. Also what hardware Starwind is recommending their customers use. Any feedback is much appreciated. Thanks!

My current setup:
• PCPitstop 8 Bay SATA HDD External Enclosure using multilane connectors
• Highpoint 4311 RAID Controllers
• Seagate (ST315005n1A1AS-RK) 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• Dell OptiPlex 755’s with Window Server 2008 x64

I just heard that Seagate has discontinued the ST315005n1A1AS-RK 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA HDD due to many drive failures and reliability issues. So I switched to their 1 TB drive (ST310005N1A1AS-RK) and I am still having issues with reliability.

StarWind does not care much about enclosure model and type and mainboard brand (as long as Windows or Linux you run are happy with them). RAID controller and NIC adapters are the ones who make the difference... Disabled or mangled write-back cache on RAID is going to kill disk I/O, lots of dropped frames and bad Jumbo support on NIC are going to kill network thru output.

For drives... Go coolest and not fastest Samsung 1TB units are dirt cheap to buy, ice-cold to run and never fail (on my memory). And not much worser compared to Seagate when talking about performance. Surprise! (being Seagate fan for ages since their first 10K rpm Cheetah).

psheahan wrote:I’ve been working on setting up a test lab to test Starwind’s high availability features, but I have been having a lot of difficulty with my choices of hardware. I’m curious to see what hardware others are using for either their test or production environments. Also what hardware Starwind is recommending their customers use. Any feedback is much appreciated. Thanks!

My current setup:
• PCPitstop 8 Bay SATA HDD External Enclosure using multilane connectors
• Highpoint 4311 RAID Controllers
• Seagate (ST315005n1A1AS-RK) 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• Dell OptiPlex 755’s with Window Server 2008 x64

I just heard that Seagate has discontinued the ST315005n1A1AS-RK 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA HDD due to many drive failures and reliability issues. So I switched to their 1 TB drive (ST310005N1A1AS-RK) and I am still having issues with reliability.

Thanks for the feed back... much appricated!

Pat

You're welcomed. Please keep us updated as soon as you'll be done Thanks!

psheahan wrote:Thanks for the feed back... much appricated!

Pat