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Re: Areca SATA cards



Cian Davis said at 15/03/2006 16:25:

> Which modules do you use for the 3Ware controllers and the Areca
> controllers?

The 3ware uses the 3w_9xxx (in sarge kernels) while the Areca uses arcmsr (not in sarge).

With the arcmsr driver, I grabbed the source from the Areca website and built, with the kernel headers installed, like so:

make -C /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build M=${PWD} modules

Then copy the module into the appropriate place:

/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/...

and run update-modules.

I *believe* the arcmsr driver is now in the upstream kernel (and so in the latest Debian sid kernels).

> Any experience with the 9550 series? Does the driver allow
> access to each disk on the controller (/dev/sda type access) or only
> defined RAID arrays?

I've not used the 9550, only the 9500 which works fine. I believe you can have the disks in pass-thru (JBOD) mode but have never used it in this way. When you have an array defined, you only get the array.

The command line tools and the web-server admin/monitor all work fine for both tools.

> We need a SATA RAID solution but we want the drivers to be in the
> current sarge release. Maintaining extra manually compiled modules would
> just be a pain. We don't have a problem using software RAID but the OCE
> capabilities of both the 3Ware and Areca controllers is very nice.

Go for 3ware if you don't want the admin overhead of maintaining the modules. They're a little cheaper and work well enough.

One difference to note: with the version of the Areca driver I have, there are no syslog/kernel messages when disks die or are removed. Hopefully this has changed in later versions. The alarm is quite loud though. ;-)

Ronny
-- 
Ronny Adsetts
Technical Director
Amazing Internet Ltd, London
t: +44 20 8607 9535
f: +44 20 8607 9536
w: www.amazinginternet.com

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