> On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 07:06:32AM -0500, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> >
> > I fully agree on avoiding cheap "hardware" RAID cards. Regarding drivers
> > going away, though, the 3ware drivers are open source and have been in the
> > kernel for a long time. If 3ware were to disappear (unlikely), I'd be
> > willing to bet that the drivers stay supported by the community.
> >
>
> I have always avoided the promise fasttrak cards for exactly that
> reason ("hardware" being in quotes). It's my understanding that
> they're not much more than their udma cards with drivers that do
> most of the RAIDing.
>
> It was also my understanding that the 3ware cards are true hardware
> raid and are up to the task of something like this, which would also
> explain why they're 4x the cost.
>
Bear in mind that what you are calling "true hardware raid" is really
a microprocessor programmed to do the raid algorithims. Usually these
microprocessors are stretched to the limit to handle the throughput
of modern udam drives. I don't know but I suspect that the small
overhead use in the mmu for software raid has far more and faster
throughput than any of these dedicated microprocessors..... and, you
can see the code and know it is bug free or will be if you report the
bug. I am the unhappy owner of several Adaptec raid cards that have
onboard processors to handle not only raid, but command processing
for the scsi bus. These turkeys have micro-code bugs that cause a
variety of problem for which there is no workaround or solution other
than trashing the cards. Don't get me wrong, I thing the 3ware
product is exceptionally good, I just wouldn't use the raid code
given the choice of linux software raid.
Currently running 10 linux software raid boxes -- mix of raid 1 and
raid 5. Yes, I'm biased :-)
Michael
Michael@Insulin-Pumpers.org
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