On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 at 4:18pm, Bryan J. Smith wrote
On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 13:30 -0700, Kirk Bocek wrote:
The 3Ware controller is pretty cool. As I said, the driver (3w-9xxx) is included in the 2.6 kernel. 3Ware provides a simple CLI utility for management. They also have a GUI tool but I didn't bother running it. You can create, remove and verify 'units' on a running system. The associated /dev entries are dynamically added and removed as you make changes. Very nice.
Make sure you have the latest 3Ware driver and firmware for the 9500S series. Also consider the "tweaks" on 3Ware's site.
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.
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.