On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 23:22 -0400, Juan Carlos wrote:
Out of curiosity..... why a 3ware 8506-4 and not a 3ware 9500 4 port card?
A lot of people are reporting issues with them.
The 9500 series adds DRAM (to the existing ASIC+SRAM design of the 7500/8500 series). There still seems to be a lot of maturity on the part of the firmware. I remember 3Ware played with RAID-5 quite awhile on the 6000 series and they eventually had to develop a new ASIC (which then appeared in the 7000 series) before they got it right.
At least a lot of people are still reporting issues, so until I hear otherwise, I've been avoiding deploying the 9500. I have only one in use, which seems to be okay for its light duties.
Besides, the 8506-4 at RAID-10 will give you about the same performance. You don't need any DRAM buffer for RAID-0, 1 or 10.