Hello Joshua, JBL> That's exactly why I recommended them. 3w-xxxx has been in the kernel a JBL> *long* time and is extremely stable. Sure, it's expensive for "just" a JBL> SATA controller, but not for a solid one that doesn't fall over at random JBL> times. Just for my 2 cents: we have a number of different generations of 3Ware cards (IDE and SATA) in our campus network, mostly with Western Digital drives. It seems quite beneficial to use their Raid Edition series of drives instead of desktop ones. Beside the longer warranty and perhaps better manufacturing and better resistance to vibration, according to the WD site, these drives also report errors (if any) quicker to a host adapter. This results in errors being handled by RAID hardware gracefully, instead of the whole drive being considered as timed out. In practice, we had some fun months with a RAID5 set made of desktop Caviars rebuilding once in a while for no apparent reason, with each disk working well for a long time. And we had no such problem with RE disks for over a year now. Hope this helps some list readers make their choice, and please don't consider this an advertisement of certain brands ;) If any other manufaturer offers capabilities similar to WD RE (especially timeouts), please take a better look if you consider a hardware RAID controller. -- Best regards, Jim Klimov mailto:klimov@xxxxxxxxxxx - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
