Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2001 14:19:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Hodge Podge <nicole@unixgirl.com> To: Borja Marcos <borjamar@sarenet.es> Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, mike.wentz@3ware.com, val@picturetrail.com Subject: Re: 3ware stuff not ready for heavy duty useage-followup Message-ID: <XFMail.010819141948.nicole@unixgirl.com> In-Reply-To: <200108191248.f7JCm5F91609@borja.sarenet.es>
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On 19-Aug-01 Borja Marcos wrote: > On Sunday 19 August 2001 09:10, you wrote: > >> Yup, cables that were supplied by 3ware. In 3 2 or 3 different cases >> and power supplies. Each were 300 or 400 watt power supplies. > > Excuse me for stepping into the discussion, but I think this is an > important issue: Which was the brand of the cases, power supplies and > fans? How much did they cost? Nowadays the choice of a good case and power > supply is as important as the choice of a good cabling, disks, etc. One of the cases was from Silicon-rax and had a 300 watt power supply. The other cases were from (I think) acmemicro and one had a 300 watt power supply and the other a 400 watt power supply. (don't know the makes of any of the supplies. > Regarding disks, I have seen whole batches of disks failing because of > poor handling in one of the dealers. When you buy a disk it usually > travels through a complex chain involving three or four dealers. It is > crazy, and it is impossible to make sure that the disks have been properly > handled all the time. One of the cures is to buy them from different > dealers, and better with different manufacture dates. Here is my belife as far as the database server goes. Since a database server is constantly reading and writing to the same file or set of files contained within the same directory, this creates a lot of concentrated usage on one small area of the drive. IDE drives (by the words of someone at 3ware) do not have the error correctimg capabilites that SCSI drives do and are not able to recover as well when bad sectors are encountered. Since most IDE's are made with the average consumer in mind, they probobly cannot withstand the small area pounding of a database like server. If my boss is willing I would like to try an experiment using the type of drives used in my TIVO, which are supposed to be specially made for high usage applications. (a special model of quantum hard drives) It may be that using this type of drive is what is required. Our Raid 5 array server that died durring rdisting of data recovered after removing the power for a moment. Ctrl-alt-del did not do it nor did reset even though the computer bios reported the IRQ used by it, the 3ware Bios would not appear. So it seems that the 3ware card died or locked up perhaps. It showed 2 failed drives however and rebuilding failed twice. Now this morning (for me up till 4am) the server is dead again! Don't get me wrong, I want this stuff to work. The cost savings is no small thing, but reliability cannot be this way. The RAID 5 server was all new Maxtor 60 Gig drives and is less than a week old. Thats a pretty high failure rate so far. I want to work with 3ware to see if they can tell me why this is happening, but so far our luck has been pretty dismal. Having a raid array that seems to regularly drop 2 drives at once and cannot recover from a 2 drive failure seems like a very bad combination. Nicole > > Borja. > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message ******* |\ __ /| (`\ ******* * * | o_o |__ ) ) * * * * // \\ * * * Nicole Harrington | AKA Hodge Podge * ----------------------(((---(((-------------------------------- nicole@unixgirl.com http://www.unixgirl.com/ webmistress@dangermouse.org http://www.dangermouse.org/ nicole@deviantimages.com http://www.deviantimages.com/ -- Powered By Coca-Cola and FreeBSD -- "The world is run by those who show up" -- The Best Place for Your Web Site - www.WebWeaver.net -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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