Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:07:13 +0200 From: Fabian Wenk <fabian@wenks.ch> To: amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: suggestions for SATA RAID cards Message-ID: <45008A01.30404@wenks.ch> In-Reply-To: <20060907184316.GC56998@svcolo.com> References: <44EC0B9B.5020705@withagen.nl> <003f01c6c68d$64688e60$b3db87d4@multiplay.co.uk> <20060907184316.GC56998@svcolo.com>
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Hello Jo Rhett wrote: > No experience with Areca. 3ware is very clueful and capable. This week I was in the process of ordering a new server with several Areca RAID controllers. In advance I checked the Areca website for the amd64 tools (the cli32 pendant) mentioned in the arcmsr(4) manpage in FreeBSD 6.1. I could not find it and filled out the support form on their website [1] to ask about it. I got an answer the next day with the information, that they don't have it now, but engineers are developing it and that a beta should be ready in a few weeks. Two days later (aka today) I had a beta version in my mail. Now I'm waiting for the new server to arrive. [1] http://www.areca.com.tw/ In April I wanted to run FreeBSD/amd64 on a server with ICP-Vortex RAID controller (GDT models). Until this point, we were really happy with the ICP-Vortex controllers, with SCSI and SATA. The ICP-Vortex controllers are supported with FreeBSD/amd64, but the srcd and icpcon (to monitor and maintain the RAID) from ICP-Vortex are only available for 32-bit. I tried them to run on FreeBSD/amd64, but they could not connect to the controllers. I did sent an e-mail to their german support, but they will not support FreeBSD/amd64. So this forced me to install and run FreeBSD/i386 on this server. Back then, ICP-Vortex already belong to Adaptec. :( I also have some servers running with 3ware controllers. I did not ask for support yet. I use the tw_cli tool to maintain and monitor the RAID, but only with FreeBSD/i386 (as I don't have the "right" CPU in this servers for amd64). With small files or a lot of processes doing I/O the 3ware are slow compared to the ICP-Vortex. On one server I had a disk which failed, but with the hot spare disk, it started to rebuild automaticaly. At about 75% of rebuilding it was reporting ECC errors reading from an other disks. I did retry the rebuild with the IgnoreECC option, but this did again fail at the same point. I did not had any success in rebuild this RAID and was forced to move all the data and services to an other server. I was running this server several days with the degraded RAID in production without problems. Afterwards I even tried a reboot (and expected it to fail), but even this worked. I don't count this RAID failure as a failure of the 3ware controller. I think the 3ware did a good job in not taking out the other failing disk from the RAID and keept it running. As I then already had to rebuild the RAID from scratch, I decided to replace the 3ware with ICP-Vortex (as the CPU is only i386 capable) for better performance. Somehow I do not like to use the new "Adaptec" ICP-Vortex controllers, so I will try Areca for now, they sound promising. bye Fabian
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