On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Jeffrey Baker wrote:
Debian "etch", which has a 2.6.18 kernel. I have contacted Areca support (as well as the linux-scsi mailing list) and their responses are usually either 1) upgrade the driver and/or firmware even though I have the latest drivers and firmware
Well, technically you don't have the latest driver, because that's the one that comes with the latest Linux kernel. I'm guessing you have RHEL5 here from that fact that you're using 2.6.18. I have a CentOS5 system here with an Areca card in it. It installed it initially with the stock 2.6.18 kernel there but it never worked quite right; all sorts of odd panics under heavy load. All my problems went away just by moving to a generic 2.6.22, released some time after the Areca card became of more first-class citizen maintained actively by the kernel developers themselves.
2) vague statements about the disk being incompatible with the controller.
That sort of situation is unfortunate but I don't feel it's unique to Areca. There's lots of reasons why some manufacturers end up with drives that don't work well with some controllers, and it is hard to assign blame when it happens. There is something to be said for buying more integrated and tested systems; ultimately if you build stuff from parts, you're kind of stuck being the QA and that process presumes that you may discover incompatible combinations and punt them out in place of ones that do.
-- * Greg Smith gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
