suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Fabian Wenk]

Hello

Jo Rhett wrote:
> No experience with Areca.  3ware is very clueful and capable.

This week I was in the process of ordering a new server with 
several Areca RAID controllers. In advance I checked the Areca 
website for the amd64 tools (the cli32 pendant) mentioned in the 
arcmsr(4) manpage in FreeBSD 6.1.

I could not find it and filled out the support form on their 
website [1] to ask about it. I got an answer the next day with the 
information, that they don't have it now, but engineers are 
developing it and that a beta should be ready in a few weeks. Two 
days later (aka today) I had a beta version in my mail. Now I'm 
waiting for the new server to arrive.

   [1] http://www.areca.com.tw/


In April I wanted to run FreeBSD/amd64 on a server with ICP-Vortex 
RAID controller (GDT models). Until this point, we were really 
happy with the ICP-Vortex controllers, with SCSI and SATA.

The ICP-Vortex controllers are supported with FreeBSD/amd64, but 
the srcd and icpcon (to monitor and maintain the RAID) from 
ICP-Vortex are only available for 32-bit. I tried them to run on 
FreeBSD/amd64, but they could not connect to the controllers.

I did sent an e-mail to their german support, but they will not 
support FreeBSD/amd64. So this forced me to install and run 
FreeBSD/i386 on this server. Back then, ICP-Vortex already belong 
to Adaptec. :(


I also have some servers running with 3ware controllers. I did not 
ask for support yet. I use the tw_cli tool to maintain and monitor 
the RAID, but only with FreeBSD/i386 (as I don't have the "right" 
CPU in this servers for amd64). With small files or a lot of 
processes doing I/O the 3ware are slow compared to the ICP-Vortex. 
On one server I had a disk which failed, but with the hot spare 
disk, it started to rebuild automaticaly. At about 75% of 
rebuilding it was reporting ECC errors reading from an other 
disks. I did retry the rebuild with the IgnoreECC option, but this 
did again fail at the same point. I did not had any success in 
rebuild this RAID and was forced to move all the data and services 
to an other server. I was running this server several days with 
the degraded RAID in production without problems. Afterwards I 
even tried a reboot (and expected it to fail), but even this 
worked. I don't count this RAID failure as a failure of the 3ware 
controller. I think the 3ware did a good job in not taking out the 
other failing disk from the RAID and keept it running. As I then 
already had to rebuild the RAID from scratch, I decided to replace 
the 3ware with ICP-Vortex (as the CPU is only i386 capable) for 
better performance.


Somehow I do not like to use the new "Adaptec" ICP-Vortex 
controllers, so I will try Areca for now, they sound promising.


bye
Fabian