On 03/05/2011 09:00 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 4:16 PM, compdoccompdoc@hotrodpc.com wrote:

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If the Marvell drivers don't pan out, it looks like I'll have to either spend money on a 3Ware|LSI|Promise controller

The 3ware are excellent...

And Promise, historically, is*not*.

Yes, I've had problems with Promise cards in the past, but haven't bought any for a long time. They seem to be moving upscale these days.

Regarding the Marvell drivers, I had good luck with the 'sata_mv' driver in Scientific Linux 6 just yesterday, running a pair of 4-port PCIe-x4 Tempo 'Sonnet' controller cards. So it appears someone has fixed that particular driver. I've decided to stick with those cards rather than re-install the Supermicro/Marvell SAS/SATA 8-port controllers, which use the 'mvsas' driver that I had problems with on the RHEL-6 evaluation distro.

So far, SL-6 has performed very well, all RAID-6 arrays re-synced properly, and running concurrent forced fscks on eight arrays was very fast (because the ext4 filesystems were still empty :-) ).

I think I'll stick with SL-6 as the VM host OS, but will use CentOS for the guest VMs. CentOS-5.x will do fine for now, and I'll have the luxury of upgrading guest OSs to CentOS-6 as the opportunity arises.

Chuck