On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 9:51 PM, Christopher G. Stach II <cgs@ldsys.net> wrote:

----- "Grant McWilliams" <grantmasterflash@gmail.com> wrote:

> Portability is no different with a RAID controller as long as you've
> standardized on controllers.

For this to be true, it would have to be absolute. Since many people have evidence that it is not true, it's not absolute. Controllers of the same revision and firmware version have had portability problems.

--
Christopher G. Stach II

Like I said in our environment we have hundreds of drives moving between controllers *every month and have had zero problems with it. Not all machines use the same controller (some are 3ware 9550SX and some are 3ware 9650SE) nor do they use the same firmware version. We've been doing this for 3 years now and have never had a drive have problems. All drives are initialized, partitioned, formatted and populated with content in 3 locations around the world and then multiple sets are shipped to 75 machines in various geographical zones and used for one month. At this point we've done close to 10,000 swaps (300/month) and we've never had a controller not see a drive and recognize it without anything more than a tw_cli rescan.

You can talk theoretics but I can tell you my real world experience. I cannot speak for other vendors but for 3ware this DOES work and is working so far with 100% success. I have a bunch of Areca controllers too but the drives are never moved between them so I can say how they'd act in that circumstance.

Grant McWilliams