[CentOS] SAS raid controllers

[Steve Brooks]

Hi Gordon,

I am running a 51645, two 31605 and four 3405 SAS raid controllers from 
adaptec plus a few more older 2820sa cards.

Two of the 3405 controllers have been running for nearly three years 
without any issues at all.

The "5" series card has been working fine. They do run very hot so even in 
an air-conditioned room make sure there is plenty cooled air passing over 
the cards heat sink. There is no fan on the card just the heat sink. As a 
comparison in the same room with the same case, fan setup and backplane 
the 3405 was running at 38 C but the 51605 was running at 105C .. Not 
Good. This causes the physical HD's to drop out of the raid and other 
problems even though the controller is reporting the temps as normal (this 
is normal for the 5 series cards from what I read).  I installed a PCI 
slot cooler (Antec Cyclone) positioned next to the card and that brought 
the controller temp down to 48 C. Remember this is in an already 
air-conditioned room holding temps at 16C.

Also beware of the HD's you buy for the raid. I bought the  WD2002 (RE4 
-GP) 2TB enterprise class drives.. They all need a firmware update, a 
nightmare when you have 48 of them to update in a working raid. All of 
them also have to be jumpered down to SATA 150 . As they have a
serious issue that even the firmware update can not fix.

Hope this helps,

Steve






On Tue, 16 Feb 2010, 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.
> 
> I noticed none of these manufacturers are listed on the upstream provider's HCL, yet they all eagerly claim "Linux" support on their
> respective websites..  The Adapetc website actually names both Centos and the upstream provider as 'supported'.
> 
> Kind Regards,
> Gordon
> 
>

-- 
Dr Stephen Brooks

http://www-solar.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/
Solar MHD Theory Group
Tel    ::  01334 463735
Fax    ::  01334 463748
E-mail :: steveb at mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk
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Mathematical Institute
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University of St. Andrews
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