[rescue] Sun Blade 100 Question - IDE

[Josh Neal]

On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 09:42:04PM -0400, Eric Webb wrote:
> On Friday 10 May 2002 05:17 pm, you wrote:
> > Or you can get the 8 port 3Ware cards with 8-160GB drives and get 1120GB of
> > storage. Works pretty good. We even have a machine with two 8 port cards.
> 
> I know they can handle it, but do they work *well* with RAID-5?  Any 
> experience with how they handle drives that die?  I'm considering going this 
> route (mucho space, cheap, unconcerned with speed).

(It's been about a year since I worked with 3Ware's 2 and 8 channel cards, so take this with a grain of salt.)

They handle drive rebuilds poorly. The BIOS _didn't_ do rebuilds in the background, so your machine would be offline while you waited a few hours for the rebuild to run. It took about 3 hours to rebuild an 80GB drive.

IMHO, 3Ware cards are only interesting if you need cheap storage, and don't have hard availability concerns. If it were me, I'd pick Linux Software Raid over 3Ware.

-josh

-- 
Josh Neal
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
	-- Homer Simpson