Karanbir Singh wrote:
Therese Trudeau wrote:
I'm just really looking for a RAID card that will do RAID 1, with four drive capacity, i.e., a master drive with the OS and applications installed and mirrored, and a slave drive for data and photos, graphic design, video, etc also mirrored. What would battery built into a RAID card do for me?
the whole point of a BBU is that you can turn on write back caching - and get a fair win in write performance on regular tasks.
You can turn on write back caching if you have a UPS as well (provided your UPS is wired into your system for a graceful shutdown)
I've never noticed any data loss from write cache being enabled on a 3ware card that didn't have a BBU. Not to say that BBU is a not a good idea in any case. Of the ~400 3Ware cards I've used(90% of them being 8006-2), only a handful have had a BBU. But all of them were backed either by a basic UPS or a full UPS with generator backup. I haven't run a computer without a UPS since 1996 ? It's second nature these days I don't even remember to recommend them anymore.
Of course I may of had data loss, but in the past 8 years it's not been anything that I've personally noticed.
I'm not sure if all 3Ware models support BBU or not.
For anything real serious like I prefer bigger dedicated storage systems, my array of choice these days comes from 3PAR (entry level pricing ~$90k), really makes my job easy and stress free.
nate