Subject: Re: [vserver] Sponsoring VServer getting up to date with mainline
From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:21:17 +0200

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)