On Thu, August 21, 2014 6:47 pm, Keith Keller wrote:
On 2014-08-21, Valeri Galtsev galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:
(And I do not include into hardware RAID these fake "raid" cards that rely on "driver" - which are indeed software RAID cards. 3ware never fell that low to make/sell any of such junk. Somebody who knows LSI better than I do will probably say the same about them).
LSI has owned 3ware for some time (who in turn were recently gobbled by some other company).
3ware was independent company till it was first bought by AMCC, then LSI bought them from AMCC. I didn't know LSI sold them to someone else, www.3ware.com still redirects to LSI. To the credit of all 3ware owners, they left nicely working 3ware (engineering, manufacturing, etc) mechanism as is without destroying it. Which is rare, and they deserve my respect for that alone. I do like LSI too, and have a few of their megaraid controllers on long lived and still very reliable boxes. I do like 3ware more as as you said it has more transparent UI, which in my book diminishes chance of human error tremendously. And I'm merely human. I do like 3ware is coming with daemon that watches and notifies me when necessary.
The LSI MegaRAID cards are real hardware RAID.
I never heard about any LSI card called RAID which are not hardware RAID. I can not say the same about, say, Adaptec or HighPoint to name two. Some of Adaptec and some of HighPoint cards even though they are sold as "RAID" cards are junk and have no place in our server room. Areca, probably, is one more company whose RAID cards all are indeed hardware RAID cards (I have 3 or 4 Areca cards in our server room).
So let me name them separately (I consider bad guys everybody who sells as RAID card at least one product which is not hardware RAID card, they confuse the world and interfere with fair profits of good guys):
good guys: LSI, 3ware, Areca
bad guys: Adaptec, HighPoint
Somebody correct me if/where I'm wrong.
Valeri
What I have heard, but only validated the former, is that the 3ware UI is simpler but the MegaRAID controllers are faster.
That being said, I do also like mdraid for certain purposes. I was able to successfully repurpose a very old controller in an old but nicely sized chassis (16 bays) by moving to an md RAID6 array, which the hardware controller doesn't support (I did say it's old). I also love the want_replacement feature in md RAID, a feature I don't believe is supported in the 3ware line (you can "rebuild" just one disk if it's bad but hasn't been kicked out of the array yet; that rebuild is much faster).
--keith
-- kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++