David Thompson <thomas at cs.wisc.edu> wrote: > <smile>As much as I hate to agree with Bryan </smile>, > this has been our experience also. Oh boy, now you're a "marked man" with regards to others. ;-> > We have many TB of disk running with 3ware controllers. We > used to use software RAID, because at that time we found > 3ware's tools to notify us of disk/array problems unusable. Hmmm, which ones/kernel combinations? You must also be sure to match your firmware + driver + 3DM version. That's pretty easy with the 7000/8000 series, because the kernels have had the latest 3w-xxxx driver for a good 18+ months now (maybe close to 2 years). That's the only issue I've ever seen -- people using different kernel driver versions to their firmware and/or user-space software. While that administration headache plagues every hardware RAID card, but it is easily trackable. Now there was a change with the 2.6 kernel IOCTL that no longer works with some of the older 3DM releases. But the newer 3DM2 for the 9000 series works with the older 7000/8000 series, no issues. That's what I use today. I've had to have 1 byte go due to a 3Ware card in almost 6 years of deployments, although I did have 2 ATA disks fail within the span of 18 hours (in the middle of a rebuild). Fortunately I was able to "knock" one of the ATA drives to get it to spindle and then finish the rebuild of one drive. > During that time, we could always tell when a disk failed, > because we would have a crashed server. Because you have to use something else to "trap" the failed disk. The MD suite and kernel drivers do _not_. There is the continuing farce that the 3Ware in JBOD mode does, as well as allows hot-swap. This is very _false_. It has lead to repeat complaints about 3Ware cards, from the _software_ RAID standpoint. That's because from a software RAID standpoint, the 3Ware card offers _nothing_ over a "regular" ATA or SCSI card. ;-> > The data would always be there after we rebooted, but a > reboot was necessary. A few years ago we migrated everything > to 3ware hardware RAID, and now we rely on our alert system, > instead of our users, to tell us when a drive fails. For any hardware RAID, you must have compatible releases: driver + firmware + user-space That typically means ensuring you have the same versions for each. That's the only issue I've ever run into. Some software RAID propoents will say that's a headache. In 6 years of 3Ware RAID deployments, I can say the piece of mind with hardware RAID and its _total_ abstraction, is well worth this little headahce. -- Bryan J. Smith Professional, Technical Annoyance b.j.smith at ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ---------------------------------------------------- *** Speed doesn't kill, difference in speed does ***