[CentOS] SAS raid controllers

[John R Pierce]

Gordon McLellan wrote:
> Is anyone running either the newish Adaptec 5805 or the new LSI 
> (3ware) 9750 sas raid controllers in a production environment with 
> Centos 5.3/5.4?
>
> The low price of these cards makes me suspicious, compared to the more 
> expensive pre-merger 3ware cards and considerably more expensive Areca 
> ARC-1680.  I've been 'burned' by the low cost of Promise raid cards 
> (just as this group pointed out, they're crap cards!), but I'm still 
> not convinced that most expensive == best.
>
> When it comes to parallel scsi cards, Adaptec has always been my 
> choice regardless of platform, but I've never used their serial scsi 
> products.  I have several older pre-merger 3ware cards installed and 
> have been working flawlessly for years, but under a windows environment.
>

LSI has always been my SCSI goto vendor of choice, and the line of 
LSI/MegaRAID cards have had a long track record..   Also note that of 
most of the big iron Unix RISC server companies use LSI as their main 
scsi/sas/etc vendor of choice..   However, this is apparently a 3ware 
design, and LSI has I guess acquired 3ware, so I'm not sure what all 
that means.

but in general, if the raid card doesn't have battery backed write-back 
cache, I'm of the opinion you might as well use JBOD and native OS raid 
(mdraid or zfs or whatever).

It does appear at least some of those 9750 cards have a BBU option
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/internal_raid/megaraid_sas/3ware/index.html