Anyone have any experience with these products yet? We've got one in for eval, but I thought I'd also ask for experiences here...
Thanks in advance.
Dave Thompson The University of Wisconsin - Madison Computer Sciences Department
On 3/3/06, David Thompson thomas@cs.wisc.edu wrote:
Anyone have any experience with these products yet? We've got one in for eval, but I thought I'd also ask for experiences here...
I've been using mine (9550sx 4 port) for about 2 months now, and it's been great. I've got two arrays on it right now, one raid1 and one raid0, both running very happily. The default centos 3ware drivers don't work with it yet. I'm not sure if this changes in update 3 (due soon) or not. Rebuilding the 3ware drivers for centos are trivial, and 3ware is hosting community provided driver disks and such on their site. Basically for the money, I'm quite happy with it.
-- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety'' Benjamin Franklin 1775
On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 09:27, Jim Perrin wrote:
On 3/3/06, David Thompson thomas@cs.wisc.edu wrote:
Anyone have any experience with these products yet? We've got one in for eval, but I thought I'd also ask for experiences here...
I've been using mine (9550sx 4 port) for about 2 months now, and it's been great. I've got two arrays on it right now, one raid1 and one raid0, both running very happily. The default centos 3ware drivers don't work with it yet. I'm not sure if this changes in update 3 (due soon) or not. Rebuilding the 3ware drivers for centos are trivial, and 3ware is hosting community provided driver disks and such on their site. Basically for the money, I'm quite happy with it.
I'll second that. We've been using the 9550sx 4/8/12 port cards in a good number machines with positive results. If using RAID5 you need to be picky about what SATA drives you use. WD desktop drives are known to cause timeouts. Use the RAID edition drives instead.
-- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety'' Benjamin Franklin 1775 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Friday 03 March 2006 16:18, David Thompson wrote:
Anyone have any experience with these products yet? We've got one in for eval, but I thought I'd also ask for experiences here...
I have two 8-port ones i a machine with 500GB hitachi drives, runs ok, but NCQ needs extremely new firmware from hitachi. I've so far tried, among other things, raid0, raid5, lvm stripe over devices, heavy I/O while rebuilding, .. everything but two performance problems looks fine (#1 ext3 sucks on 3ware raid5, #2 I can't get good read performance on two raid5s in a lvm stripe).
/Peter
Thanks in advance.
Dave Thompson
On Friday 03 March 2006 10:18, David Thompson wrote:
Anyone have any experience with these products yet? We've got one in for eval, but I thought I'd also ask for experiences here...
Thanks in advance.
After reading the other replies, I'll guess I'll be the only one to say something negative then...
Got a 9550SX 4 port on a Tyan K8WE. Updated drivers, updated firmware and bios - nothing helped. Whenever I had high IO loads the system would crash. Eventually disabling write cache reduced the IO enough for the system to be stable.
Peter.
Peter Arremann wrote:
On Friday 03 March 2006 10:18, David Thompson wrote:
Anyone have any experience with these products yet? We've got one in for eval, but I thought I'd also ask for experiences here...
Thanks in advance.
After reading the other replies, I'll guess I'll be the only one to say something negative then...
Got a 9550SX 4 port on a Tyan K8WE. Updated drivers, updated firmware and bios
- nothing helped. Whenever I had high IO loads the system would crash.
Eventually disabling write cache reduced the IO enough for the system to be stable.
Interesting. I have the same motherboard in a few new test machines and we ended up going with Highpoint RocketRAID 2224 cards. We used these because they supported 4 internal drives and had a multilane/infiniband connector on the bracket for an external tank of 4 additional drives. I haven't experienced any performance problems with either the internal or external drives (Seagate 500gig SATAII all around). I did have a couple of drives that seemed to be in "popcorn popper mode" under heavy usage when NCQ was enabled so I turned it off and it went away (not really an issue for me since these boxes are just pushing around a lot of huge uncompressed video files and not doing any significant seeking).
I had initially planned on going with 3Ware boards as I've had great success with them in the past, but some of our video editing folks wanted the ability to cart around shoeboxes with 2TB in them...sneakernet style.
Cheers,
On Fri, 3 Mar 2006 19:04:53 -0500 Peter Arremann loony@loonybin.org wrote:
- nothing helped. Whenever I had high IO loads the system would crash.
Eventually disabling write cache reduced the IO enough for the system to be stable.
I've heard that from many different sources now - it really looks like certain 3wares and tyans don't like eachother.
Jure Pečar wrote:
On Fri, 3 Mar 2006 19:04:53 -0500 Peter Arremann loony@loonybin.org wrote:
- nothing helped. Whenever I had high IO loads the system would crash.
Eventually disabling write cache reduced the IO enough for the system to be stable.
I've heard that from many different sources now - it really looks like certain 3wares and tyans don't like eachother.
It's the motherboard. The bios has some "issues" and it seems to gobble up an ungodly amount of option rom memory space. Tyan blames nvidia...blah blah blah...So boards like the 9550 and other RAID controllers get "crowded out" leading to unpredictable performance issues.
You can try freeing more some more option rom space. Go to the bios menu and in Advanced\Intergrated Device\Mac Opt scan set to (disabled). Also, disable the nvidia onboard raid controller. If you've got a pci-e video card, that can also hog a lot of option rom space.
I had an issue with my RAID card being recognized at all until I did some of the above and finally got it to the point where things were recognized enough to update everyone's firmware. Now it all plays nicely together.
Lastly, Tyan's tech support was an absolute nightmare to deal with. The highpoint people were pleasant, quick to respond, and very helpful. I've also had very pleasant experiences with 3Ware so perhaps they might be able to help with the performance issues with their board and this motherboard.
Cheers,
On Friday 03 March 2006 20:06, Chris Mauritz wrote:
I've also had very pleasant experiences with 3Ware so perhaps they might be able to help with the performance issues with their board and this motherboard.
They used to be great - but since they became AMCC I've not had any luck with them... When did you last talk to 3ware support?
Peter.
Peter Arremann wrote:
On Friday 03 March 2006 20:06, Chris Mauritz wrote:
I've also had very pleasant experiences with 3Ware so perhaps they might be able to help with the performance issues with their board and this motherboard.
They used to be great - but since they became AMCC I've not had any luck with them... When did you last talk to 3ware support?
Maybe about 18 months ago. I haven't really needed to talk to them in quite some time, but then again, I don't have any of their "bleeding edge" products. 8-)
That's unfortunate since they were one of the early "good guys" that gave more than lip service support to Linux.
Cheers,
-
Chris Mauritz -
David Thompson -
Jim Perrin -
Jure Pečar -
Peter Arremann -
Peter Kjellström -
Will Dinkel