Anyone having good results with 4-STABLE and the 3Ware 9000 series controllers? -- albert chin (china@thewrittenword.com)
We have a one machine with a 9500S-4 controller in RAID 10 configuration. Performance in RAID10 configuration is subjectively no different to the 7506-4 in RAID10. (Both cards seem excellent with similar disks - WD 200GB / 8MB cache drives). We haven't done any systematic testing. AFAIK the real advantage for the 9000 series cards is for RAID5 arrays. A few caveats: 1. The firmware is included in the driver. The driver will update the card's firmware if the driver has more recent firmware than the card. The firmware that came with the 4-STABLE driver at the beginning of August was quite old; we had to kldload a more recent driver from the 3ware website in order to complete the install. 2. We haven't been able to get 3dm2 working on this machine. (But the CLI does work). We haven't spent a huge amount of time on it yet - but do want to get it working to remotely monitor the array / generate alerts. If anyone has got 3dm2 working with FreeBSD 4.x I'd be really interested to know. Albert Chin wrote:> Anyone having good results with 4-STABLE and the 3Ware 9000 series > controllers? >
> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Albert Chin > Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 6:45 PM > To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: 4-STABLE and 3Ware 9000 series controllers > > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 05:38:18PM +0100, Jason Thomson wrote: > > A few caveats: > > > > 1. The firmware is included in the driver. The driver > will update the > > card's firmware if the driver has more recent firmware than > the card. > > The firmware that came with the 4-STABLE driver at the beginning of > > August was quite old; we had to kldload a more recent > driver from the > > 3ware website in order to complete the install. > > I went through the software download procedure on their web site and > was able to download 9.0.2-Upgrade.zip. So is it a bad idea to use an > older driver with the firmware from this package? It seems you can > -UTWA_FLASH_FIRMWARE and the driver won't flash the firmware on you. >The driver will not flash firmware if the firmware image it is bundled with, is older than the firmware on the controller. Of course, you can always disable flashing by not defining TWA_FLASH_FIRMWARE.