[nycbug-talk] RAID controllers - what doesn't suck?

[O_Sleep]

Charles,

I have been using dell pe 1650's with freebsd.  They have rebranded 
adaptec SCSI RAID cards.  Haven't had a large enough number of drive 
failures to raise concern.  Are you using the aacli utility?

-Bjorn Nelson

On Sep 13, 2004, at 4:29 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Looking for some feedback from people using low to midrange SCSI RAID 
> controllers under FreeBSD (but other *BSD input would be useful as 
> well).
>
> Last time I shopped, Adaptec seemed like the best value for the money. 
> But since installing a number of these, I'm rethinking that.  The most 
> annoying problem I've run into is the controller just marking drives 
> as bad.  If I reboot and ask it to build back onto the "bad" drives, 
> all is well for quite some time.  Most of the drives are IBM, bought 
> before people started noting that IBM drives are garbage.
>
> This of course leads to troubleshooting hell... Checking the firmware 
> on all the drives and then digging up a windows box and scsi card to 
> "flash" the drives, double and triple checking the scsi chain is 
> terminated properly, hoping that the SCA backplane isn't hosed, etc.  
> Time consuming and a lot of mixed results.  Part of me just thinks 
> this is an issue with the IBM drive, but then again, the drives work 
> fine standalone.  In a few days I'm taking one problematic system down 
> and junking all the IBM drives for some new (and larger) Seagates.  So 
> if that makes everything "OK", I'll stick with Seagate.
>
> One other question...  I'm going to be setting up a new shell server 
> that also serves up a decent amount of ~user webpages.  That too will 
> need a RAID controller.  I'm not really up on what advantages SATA has 
> over normal IDE drives, but I wonder if perhaps SATA RAID would be 
> sufficient in this case?  Lots and lots of random reads, not very 
> sequential. Opinions?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charles
>
> ___
> Charles Sprickman
> NetEng/SysAdmin
> Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
> spork at bway.net - 212.655.9344
>
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