Is anyone running either the newish Adaptec 5805 or the new LSI (3ware) 9750 sas raid controllers in a production environment with Centos 5.3/5.4? The low price of these cards makes me suspicious, compared to the more expensive pre-merger 3ware cards and considerably more expensive Areca ARC-1680. I've been 'burned' by the low cost of Promise raid cards (just as this group pointed out, they're crap cards!), but I'm still not convinced that most expensive == best. When it comes to parallel scsi cards, Adaptec has always been my choice regardless of platform, but I've never used their serial scsi products. I have several older pre-merger 3ware cards installed and have been working flawlessly for years, but under a windows environment. I noticed none of these manufacturers are listed on the upstream provider's HCL, yet they all eagerly claim "Linux" support on their respective websites.. The Adapetc website actually names both Centos and the upstream provider as 'supported'. Kind Regards, Gordon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20100216/d95e1649/attachment.html>
On 02/16/2010 06:17 PM, Gordon McLellan wrote:> The low price of these cards makes me suspicious, compared to the more > expensive pre-merger 3ware cards and considerably more expensive Areca > ARC-1680.Dont have an answer to your question as such, but I can tell you that the Arc-1680's are very nice. I've been using 4 of these cards for a few months now. no problems, and excellent performance ( i run raid-10, 12 disks off each of the hba's ) - KB
Gordon McLellan wrote:> Is anyone running either the newish Adaptec 5805 or the new LSI > (3ware) 9750 sas raid controllers in a production environment with > Centos 5.3/5.4? > > The low price of these cards makes me suspicious, compared to the more > expensive pre-merger 3ware cards and considerably more expensive Areca > ARC-1680. I've been 'burned' by the low cost of Promise raid cards > (just as this group pointed out, they're crap cards!), but I'm still > not convinced that most expensive == best. > > When it comes to parallel scsi cards, Adaptec has always been my > choice regardless of platform, but I've never used their serial scsi > products. I have several older pre-merger 3ware cards installed and > have been working flawlessly for years, but under a windows environment. >LSI has always been my SCSI goto vendor of choice, and the line of LSI/MegaRAID cards have had a long track record.. Also note that of most of the big iron Unix RISC server companies use LSI as their main scsi/sas/etc vendor of choice.. However, this is apparently a 3ware design, and LSI has I guess acquired 3ware, so I'm not sure what all that means. but in general, if the raid card doesn't have battery backed write-back cache, I'm of the opinion you might as well use JBOD and native OS raid (mdraid or zfs or whatever). It does appear at least some of those 9750 cards have a BBU option http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/internal_raid/megaraid_sas/3ware/index.html
Hi Gordon, I am running a 51645, two 31605 and four 3405 SAS raid controllers from adaptec plus a few more older 2820sa cards. Two of the 3405 controllers have been running for nearly three years without any issues at all. The "5" series card has been working fine. They do run very hot so even in an air-conditioned room make sure there is plenty cooled air passing over the cards heat sink. There is no fan on the card just the heat sink. As a comparison in the same room with the same case, fan setup and backplane the 3405 was running at 38 C but the 51605 was running at 105C .. Not Good. This causes the physical HD's to drop out of the raid and other problems even though the controller is reporting the temps as normal (this is normal for the 5 series cards from what I read). I installed a PCI slot cooler (Antec Cyclone) positioned next to the card and that brought the controller temp down to 48 C. Remember this is in an already air-conditioned room holding temps at 16C. Also beware of the HD's you buy for the raid. I bought the WD2002 (RE4 -GP) 2TB enterprise class drives.. They all need a firmware update, a nightmare when you have 48 of them to update in a working raid. All of them also have to be jumpered down to SATA 150 . As they have a serious issue that even the firmware update can not fix. Hope this helps, Steve On Tue, 16 Feb 2010, Gordon McLellan wrote:> Is anyone running either the newish Adaptec 5805 or the new LSI (3ware) 9750 sas raid controllers in a production environment with > Centos 5.3/5.4? > > The low price of these cards makes me suspicious, compared to the more expensive pre-merger 3ware cards and considerably more > expensive Areca ARC-1680.? I've been 'burned' by the low cost of Promise raid cards (just as this group pointed out, they're crap > cards!), but I'm still not convinced that most expensive == best. > > When it comes to parallel scsi cards, Adaptec has always been my choice regardless of platform, but I've never used their serial scsi > products.? I have several older pre-merger 3ware cards installed and have been working flawlessly for years, but under a windows > environment. > > I noticed none of these manufacturers are listed on the upstream provider's HCL, yet they all eagerly claim "Linux" support on their > respective websites..? The Adapetc website actually names both Centos and the upstream provider as 'supported'. > > Kind Regards, > Gordon > >-- Dr Stephen Brooks http://www-solar.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/ Solar MHD Theory Group Tel :: 01334 463735 Fax :: 01334 463748 E-mail :: steveb at mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk --------------------------------------- Mathematical Institute North Haugh University of St. Andrews St Andrews, Fife KY16 9SS SCOTLAND ---------------------------------------