ATA Raid

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Jason Dixon wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 11:09, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
> 
> > First off, my experience with software RAID (both 0 and 1) under Linux has 
> > been excellent, although I've as yet suffered no failures. However, I 
> > suggest forking over the cash for a 3Ware adapter, they're not that 
> > expensive. I went all out and got a 12-drive card for $560, but they have 
> > two- and four-drive cards that are darn cheap. And they are "real" hardware 
> > RAID, with excellent performance and other RAID modes (5, 10, etc.) 
> > available to boot. Plus, the kernel module is open-source and included 
> > since God-knows-when in the mainstream kernels, so you need to do NOTHING 
> > to make it work... it just works.
> > 
> > What's not to love?
> 
> What kind of monitoring do those support (syslog/snmp)? 

3dm is their management suite which has a command-line interface, and a 
small web-based interface... reports of disk related events will end up in 
syslog.

> What has your
> experience been?  (I know you haven't had any failures, but surely you
> have monitored _somthing_)  :)

it behaves a lot like any other nice raid system, with the right disk tray
or with serial ata disks you can hot-swap dead drives, rebuild on the fly
fail over to hot spares etc. if anything they've been more reiable for us
than scsi some of scsi subsystems because a failing drive can't hang a bus
shared with other disks size each drive has it's own port on the
diskswitch controller.


currently their controllers are limited to 2TB per filesystem, which is an 
issue for us but not for most people.


in some occasions we use them in jbod mode and use linux software raid at 
which point some of their functionality goes away  but they're still very 
nice controllers...

 > Thanks,
> 
> 

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu    
GPG Key Fingerprint:     5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2