SATA RAID Support

[Oliver Brandmueller]

Hi.

On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 03:29:35AM -0800, David G. Lawrence wrote:
>    This sounds like a bug in the drive firmware. Did you look into any
> firmware updates from Western Digital? It's possible that the 3ware
> controllers push the drives a bit harder and expose problems that wouldn't
> show up at slightly lower TPS rates.

We suspect an incompatibility between controller and drive: The drive 
totally locks up at that point. But with another controller (and th ICP 
isn't really slower) we don't see the behaviour. I have no per disk 
statistics on the 3ware, so I cannot tell about the tps on a single disk 
compared to the ICP.

We saw no firmware upgrade from WD and mail sent to them was only
answered by a bot, that sent a totally useless FAQ.

>    We (TeraSolutions and Download Technologies) have deployed the 3ware
> 9500S controllers extensively and haven't seen any problems with the 7k250
> and 7k400 series Hitachi drives that we use with them.

We have the 7506 with 7200 PATA drives and have no problem at all with 
them. The only time a disk failed in that setup, that was really a 
failing disk. Rebuild worked as expected in the prod system; of course 
we check every new system for a working rebuild by removing a disk or 
even sometimes by building a RAID on a known bad disk.

- Oliver

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