On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 16:58 -0500, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote: > How often you get raid controller card go wrong (or any other PCI card > for that matter)? Sure, if you are careless when handling it and static > electricity that accumulated in your body fries it. Those installed in > production servers, very darn close to never. GPU and MACs (NIC ICs) tend to be very high density and under-cooled. They are solid state devices that tend to belly up in 3-5 years. 3Ware's ASIC, SRAM and ATA logic are rather low-density, and are always cold to the touch in my experience. Hence why I have _never_ seen the fail -- and I'm talking dozens upon dozens of cards deployed. > Even with that, if you keep a number of servers running, you usually > standardize on the cards you use (for example, you go with 3ware and > stick with them, or you go with Adaptec and stick with them). Exactly. I _never_ recommend just 1 device. I'll standardize on 2+ servers or 2+ desktops with 3Ware cards. E.g., even at home, I have (2) 3Ware 7000 series and (4) 3Ware 6000 series. I really hate it when I go into a department and they have a hodge- podge of servers -- it's just a horrendously poor sign of configuration management. Money is _never_ a factor, it's how you use it, and I've made do with far less than most. Standardization is very key, even if it gets revised regularly or you even change vendors a couple of times. There are ways to deal with those situations. > Having a spare card or two in a drawer is a good idea anyhow, if you > unexpectedly need to build the server overnight. Well, when you're talking 4+ servers, you typically _should_ have a "test" server which is also your "standby" server. Right now in one department in the organization I'm working with, that is their #1 issue. [ I tire of having to do "new" things on production servers. ] > And usually, you don't need to have exact same model of the card. > In most cases, cards produced by one manufacturer can read RAID > metadata information written by different card models (of the same > manufacturer). Not always. Adaptec has had a nasty habit of buying other solutions and ending up with 3-4 incompatible meta-data formats. Even LSI Logic has done this a few times too -- although far less because they are OEM focused, not a retail vendor that customizes for OEMs (like Adaptec). I've found 3Ware to be a company that has produced only their own designs and meta-data format. They are also very, very good on stating when a firmware change does affect the meta-data format. Their newer firmware have _always_ allowed a newer firmware to read an older one. 3Ware's products are very proliferated. While I understand the "risk" arguments made here, understand that over my past 5+ years of 3Ware deployments, my clients and I have undergone the _least_ risk thanx to 3Ware compared to other vendors and solutions. That's why I find most of the LVM/MD arguments that may be applicable to _some_ vendors to be wholly inapplicable to 3Ware. > So you can access your data as long as the replacement card has enough > ports to connect all disks from failed card. In the case of 3Ware, this has been 100% true. -- Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx --------------------------------------------------------------------- It is mathematically impossible for someone who makes more than you to be anything but richer than you. Any tax rate that penalizes them will also penalize you similarly (to those below you, and then below them). Linear algebra, let alone differential calculus or even ele- mentary concepts of limits, is mutually exclusive with US journalism. So forget even attempting to explain how tax cuts work. ;->