Re: 3ware vs Areca

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008, Jeffrey Baker wrote:
>
>> Their firmware is, frankly, garbage. In more than one instance we
>> have had the card panic when a disk fails, which is obviously counter
>> to the entire purpose of a RAID. We finally removed the Areca
>> controllers from our database server and replaced them with HP P800s.
>
> Can you give a bit more detail here? If what you mean is that the driver
> for the card generated an OS panic when a drive failed, that's not
> necessarily the firmware at all. I know I had problems with the Areca cards
> under Linux until their driver went into the mainline kernel in 2.6.19, all
> kinds of panics under normal conditions. Haven't seen anything like that
> with later Linux kernels or under Solaris 10, but then again I haven't had a
> disk failure yet either.

Well, it is difficult to tell if the fault is with the hardware or the
software. No traditional kernel panic has been observed. But most
recently in my memory we had an Areca HBA which, when one of its WD
RE-2 disks failed, completely stopped responding to both the command
line and the web management interface. Then, i/o to that RAID became
increasingly slower, and slower, until it stopped serving i/o at all.
At that point it was not relevant that the machine was technically
still running.

We have another Areca HBA that starts throwing errors up the SCSI
stack if it runs for more than 2 months at a time. We have to reboot
it on a schedule to keep it running.

-jwb