Brent McDowell wrote:
Hi;
I'm keen to hear of anyone's experience (be it good or bad) with the 3ware range of ATA raid controllers. Linux experience too, would be good.
I've been using 3ware controllers for at least 2 years. It's by far the best ide raid controller on the market. (The only in my view.) It's got the best linux support of any raid controller (ide or scsi). The driver is completely open source, and you use the same driver for all cards. (Of course newer cards require newer driver, but they provide a driver's disk for RH 6.2-7.x.) 3ware is actively developing the linux driver, and is actively work on linux utils for their cards. They are one of the few raid card makers that have cmdline, or gui based management utils. In addition their driver avoid the ide subsystem and acts like a scsi device.
On the downside it's not as full featured as more the mature raid controllers (no splitting arrays into logical device) . Their raid 5 performance is okay, but not great. (Of course with the size and price of ide drives. You could just buy bigger drives and run raid 10.) Also they lack battery backed cache. Of course you won't get the above with anyone else either.
