On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 07:39:58PM +0200, Tom Laermans wrote: > 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/... sounds good, I take it that you are using such cards somewhere, (they are not readily available in Austria, so I haven't had much personal contact with folks using them, not to speak of hands-on experience), but I would be interested in the following things: - can I create a raid description for the controller (externally) and upload that somehow? i.e. to map a preexisting raid layout (just curious, not terribly important) - can I get access to the smart values for disk in a hardware array? - are there any restrictions on the disks (e.g. size or low level commands) when driving them in JBOD? - what low level tools are available to manage and monitor the arrays and disks? any input/experience there would be really appreciated (currently looking at the ARC-1680 line) TIA, Herbert > 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)