On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 08:59 -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Do *not* use the latest 3ware driver/firmware (i.e. the 9.2 codeset) if you have more than unit per controller. There is a bad cache allocation bug in that codeset that kills performance if there is more than unit present on a controller when it boots. And, yes, this holds even if the 2nd unit is merely a hot spare.
Yep, I just forwarded that.
Of course, the 9.2 codeset is the only one that properly handles BBUs, which presents a bit of a catch-22 if your controllers have 'em. The current kludge^Wfix for that situation is to boot with the hot spare drives *physically* disconnected from the controller, plug them in after the system is up, and then go into 3dm2/tw_cli and add them as hot spares. There's a beta of 9.2.1 on 3ware's site, but my only 9500 based system is in production now (using the above kludge), so I won't be testing it until after it's officially released.
Yep, I saw that too.
I'm probably going to go back to my previous instinct, until the 9500S has been out for awhile, it's probably safest to stick with the 8506 series. Just don't do RAID-5 on it though. ;-ppp