[CentOS] OT: 3ware [was: Install Centos 6 x86_64 ...]

Mon Sep 8 02:55:21 UTC 2014
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2014-09-08, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> Indeed, lucky me. As of this moment I have 6 of 9650 in production boxes.
> For at least 6 years. During which time none of them ever failed on me
> (including any trouble with arrays). Knocking on wood.

You totally jinxed them!  You'll probably have three of them fail in the
next month.  ;-)

> I must say though
> that I do prefer the most reliable drives. And I always have arrays
> checked at least once a week through 3ware scheduler (this causes walk
> through the whole surface of each of drives, thus ensuring bad blocks if
> any do not stay undiscovered...).

I decided to do verifies once a month, instead of the default once a
week.  My thinking was that hitting all of every drive so frequently
might be a wear factor, but periodic scrubs are still important; plus,
for my larger arrays, having performance slightly degraded 1/7 of the
time was not so desirable.  So now I do 12 verifies a year instead of
52.  I think the verify has picked up maybe two errors in ~10 years.
(It does sometimes expose when a drive is failing, which is handy.)

The LSI MegaRAID cards have their own scheduling, and I haven't had
time enough to read the manual to figure out how to set this (or indeed,
even to figure out what the schedule is; the MegaRAID UI is much more
arcane than the 3ware).

--keith

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us