On Tuesday 12 January 2010, Christopher Chan wrote:
Keith Keller wrote:
On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 08:07:17AM +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:
I see that the Areca driver has finally made it into the mainline Linux kernel. But I wonder how things have improved from this particular case.
http://notemagnet.blogspot.com/2008/08/linux-disk-failures-areca-is-not- so.html
I can't speak to this, except to point out that it is almost 18 months old, which is quite a long time in kernel development space.
Which is why I am asking.
With the right incantation, one can call smartctl directly on a drive connected to a 3ware controller, no matter what kind of array it is in. (I believe you can even call it on a drive assigned as a hot spare.)
Which is why I specifically said 'performance wise' as respects 3ware. I don't remember anything bad about 3ware stability wise or monitoring wise.
Is that supposed to be a joke? 3ware has certainly had their fair share of stability problems (drive time-outs, bbu-problems, inconsistent behaviour, ...) and monitoring wise they suck (imho). Do you like tw_cli? Enjoying the fact that "show diag" gives you a cyclic text buffer without references? etc.
...that said, it's not much worse than the competetion, storage simply sucks ;-(
/Peter
Any comments? With 3ware lately not looking so good from comments I have heard on the list over the past few years performance wise, I wonder how Adaptec and Areca look now?
I've run an exclusively 3ware shop since I ditched my last aacraid machines a few years back. But with all their issues, I am definitely considering trying Areca on my next server that's not planned to be immediately mission-critical. (I wouldn't switch back to Adaptec unless I knew their interface tools, and especially their cli, had improved dramatically; the aaccli/afacli interfaces were simply atrocious.)
What issues are you having with 3ware?