Subject: Re: [vserver] Sponsoring VServer getting up to date with mainline
From: Tom Laermans <tom.laermans@powersource.cx>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:39:58 +0200

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)