On Thursday 23 June 2005 00:21, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 23:22 -0400, Juan Carlos wrote:
> > Out of curiosity..... why a 3ware 8506-4 and not a 3ware 9500 4 port
> > card?
>
> A lot of people are reporting issues with them.
>
> The 9500 series adds DRAM (to the existing ASIC+SRAM design of the
> 7500/8500 series). There still seems to be a lot of maturity on the
> part of the firmware. I remember 3Ware played with RAID-5 quite awhile
> on the 6000 series and they eventually had to develop a new ASIC (which
> then appeared in the 7000 series) before they got it right.
>
> At least a lot of people are still reporting issues, so until I hear
> otherwise, I've been avoiding deploying the 9500. I have only one in
> use, which seems to be okay for its light duties.
>
> Besides, the 8506-4 at RAID-10 will give you about the same performance.
> You don't need any DRAM buffer for RAID-0, 1 or 10.
Actually, support for the 9500s has gotten quite a lot better over the past
few months - you might want to give them another try. A college of mine
mis-ordered a few of them when they first came out and at the beginning the
results were less than stallar. By now (FC4 and CentOS 4U1) the drivers are
stable enough that the tests I ran could no longer crash the box.
Anyway, another reason to still go with the 8xxx series is that if you need to
run an older distribution you'll run into issues. CentOS 4 should be fine,
but if you still have the original CentOS 3 isos around, you'll need to find
something newer.
Peter.
