Ed W wrote:
> I agree in theory, but I have been desperately disappointed with a two
> 3Ware cards of various generations. They struggled to get read or
> write performance to match a half that of a single drive in a 4 drive
> raid5 config.
Yes, not even mentioning what happens when one of your disks fails and
the 3Ware CPU appears not to be up to scratch -at all-.
I have nothing but good experience with Areca cards though; they also
have an in-kernel driver, works great, 2-4-8-12-16-24 port cards in
PCI-X and PCIe, BBU available, larger cards have a swappable cache dimm
and even an out of band network port for snmp management/telnet
interface/...
I can highly recommend them; had some minor issues with the SAT2-MV8
cards from Supermicro - used 2 of them for about 1.5 years now and just
replaced them with an Areca 16 port card.
They're not very cheap though (but I believe a many-ports 3Ware isn't
that cheap either?)
Tom (just bought a new desktop pc, based on Asus P5Q WS board with 1
PCI-X slot)