[CentOS] New controller card issues

Fri May 29 04:36:31 UTC 2015
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2015-05-28, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> Now, seriously: of more than a couple of dozens of cards I used during
> last about 13 years not a single one died on me.

I have had a couple dozen hardware RAID controllers over the years.  I
have not had the success you've had, but I've had very few hard
failures.  I have had one data loss event, where a bad BBU was causing
problems with an old controller (of course I had backups, as should
everyone).  I've had two other controllers just die, but replacing it
was easy, and the new controller recognized the arrays immediately.
This includes moving two different disk arrays from two different 9650s
to two different 9750s, so whoever wrote that arrays are not compatible
across different models is at least partly incorrect.

I do also have an LSI controller, which has been fine, but it's only one
controller so it's not enough data points to draw any conclusions.  I also
have an md RAID array (on a very old 3ware controller which doesn't
support RAID6), and it's also been fine.  It hasn't suffered through any
major catastrophes, though I do think it's had one or two fatal kernel
panics, and once or twice had a hard reset done.  It's still fine even
with a small number of really crappy "green" drives still in the array
(I learned that lesson the hard way--don't use green drives with a hardware
RAID controller!).

--keith

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