Date: Thu, 03 May 2001 15:45:05 -0700 From: "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> To: praxis@techpraxis.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 3Ware Escalade experience? (And IBM 75GXP reliability problems) Message-ID: <F226pH71yEXUIEAOeIi00004372@hotmail.com>
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> > Would anybody on this list happen to have any experience with 3Ware's > > Escalade IDE RAID (hardware) controllers on FreeBSD? >I have successfully used them on a clients' file server recently. They work >like a charm. Excellent. Thanks to all who replied. > > I may end up setting up a high end file server (insofar as an IDE-based > > system can be called "high-end") and want to use these controllers due >to > > the absurdly high cost of SCSI disks compared to IDE. >I would not confuse these Escalade controllers with the sub-par hardware >performance of Ide raid controllers like the Promise 100s. The technology >on >the Escalade controllers, 2nd generation, is extremely stable and fast. This I know, hence, my use of Escalade cards rather than the far better known Promise cards. I do my homework, too. :-) (Hence my question) The cards would be responsible for streaming theater-quality video, though probably not in real-time (real-time would require about 170MB/sec sustained--a bit more than current technology can handle at any reasonable price range) and need to be extremely stable and reliable under FreeBSD. I may end up using Linux because of its future support of Irix's excellent filesystem (excellent for video anyway), but I really don't want to after gettign to know my daemonic side. >I get regular 89/95 MB/s (write/read) performance on an 89 Gig RAID 10 >array, made up of 4 IBM 45G Deskstar HDs. The FreeBSD system treats the >Escalade controller as a kind of SCSI RAID card. As I would expect. (the SCSI part) Performance figures sound great, though you may be interested to know that IBM has been having serious reliability problems with their Deskstar model 75GXP (but not 60GXP) model hard drives, PARTICULARLY the 45GB ones. This has been unofficially confirmed by IBM and has been reported by many end users. If you'd like, I can try to get a link for you on StorageReview.com, or you can look through its articles and forums yourself. I just thought that I would mention this in case your reputation might be at stake by using hard drives that are flawed by design. I personally recommended these drives as well, which was perfectly rational given IBM's reputation, the fact that they invented many of the techs used in modern hard drives, and the fact that those drives have stellar performance. Fortunately, none of the drives that were purchased on my word have "let the smoke out." You might also note that 45GB 75GXPs are getting hard to come by. I haven't strictly followed the issue, so it may have blown over and been associated with a certain batch of drives or something. >All you have to do is install the drives, install the controller, set it up >in the BIOS, create the twe0 device in BSD, and then add your partition to >the array with standard technique. easy! Again, thanks for the info. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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