OT: Upgrade feasibility, to AMD64/5.x.x or to stay i386/4.9 on AMD64 hardware?

[Chris Hedley]

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Eirik Øverby wrote:
> This one is gonna be tricky on you, I think. The driver used for most Adaptec 
> RAID controllers (IDE and SCSI alike) isn't currently working on amd64 (in 
> 64-bit mode, that is). I have repeatedly asked if anyone will step up to the 
> task and fix that, as I have an Adaptec Zero-Channel RAID add-on-board for my 
> dual opteron just collecting dust at the moment, but the general answer is 
> 'no time'... Too bad.

I've found that the driver for the 2410SA (aac) works fine in 64-bit mode; 
although I'm not compiling for amd64 right now, but (lack of) problems 
with the 2410SA isn't the reason.

> Then again, I have nothing but really REALLY bad experiences with Adaptec IDE 
> RAID solutions, so perhaps you should choose differently there.. Most all the 
> others are supported, and supported well afaik.

The card seems reliable enough once it's up and running, although getting 
it configured can be a major headache as the configuration software is 
terrible and the card itself seems prone to crashing when being configured 
(even using the BIOS menus).  That, and taking forever to build an array 
(8 hours for a 400GB RAID-10 seems excessive) and terribly slow write 
speeds (~7MB/sec for sequential writes to a RAID-10 array - something is 
seriously wrong with its design for the performance to be _that_ bad. 
That's the same with different OSes and on different MBs/CPUs as well, so 
it's not a FreeBSD or incompatability issue) means I personally wouldn't 
consider buying another one.  The OP is probably better off looking 
elsewhere.  (The hot-swap box is nice, though, although it transpires 
that's made by SuperMicro, not Adaptec).

Chris.