On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 at 4:18pm, Bryan J. Smith wrote
> On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 13:30 -0700, Kirk Bocek wrote:
> > The 3Ware controller is pretty cool. As I said, the driver (3w-9xxx) is
> > included in the 2.6 kernel. 3Ware provides a simple CLI utility for
> > management. They also have a GUI tool but I didn't bother running it.
> > You can create, remove and verify 'units' on a running system. The
> > associated /dev entries are dynamically added and removed as you make
> > changes. Very nice.
>
> Make sure you have the latest 3Ware driver and firmware for the 9500S
> series. Also consider the "tweaks" on 3Ware's site.
Do *not* use the latest 3ware driver/firmware (i.e. the 9.2 codeset) if
you have more than unit per controller. There is a bad cache allocation
bug in that codeset that kills performance if there is more than unit
present on a controller when it boots. And, yes, this holds even if the
2nd unit is merely a hot spare.
Of course, the 9.2 codeset is the only one that properly handles BBUs,
which presents a bit of a catch-22 if your controllers have 'em. The
current kludge^Wfix for that situation is to boot with the hot spare
drives *physically* disconnected from the controller, plug them in after
the system is up, and then go into 3dm2/tw_cli and add them as hot spares.
There's a beta of 9.2.1 on 3ware's site, but my only 9500 based system is
in production now (using the above kludge), so I won't be testing it until
after it's officially released.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
