Re: OT: 3Ware vs. Promise
Martin Loschwitz said:
> What IDE-Raid-Controller would you prefer? The 3Ware Escalade
> 6410 or anyone from Promise? And why?
3ware. promise may be good but their driver support for linux
is very bad. beware of 3ware's raid 5. DO NOT USE IT. at least not
for a while. it still has serious issues(which i have experienced
first hand). Raid 10 and raid1 should be fine(im currently runinng
6x80GB drives in raid10 on 3 systems on 6800 series controllers).
i would not use promise based soley on their lack of support for
linux for the raid cards. non raid their cards are great, i love
the ATA66 and ATA100 cards i use them everywhere, but not the
raid editions. 3ware's drivers have been accepted into the linux
kernel, and are available in the default debian install. i plan
to setup a 4x100GB raid 10 array at home soon using 3ware as well.
if you use 3ware do yourself a favor and don't touch raid5 for
about 6 months. or use software raid5. i would give them that long
to hammer out the bugs in their latest "update". they had another
update that went out in sept or august but it didn't fix the
problem. and they shipped a new series of cards(7000 series) but
those were recalled, only later to be un-recalled due to
problems/fixes etc.
another thing is 3ware cards don't seem to mind long IDE
cables(24-32") while promise cards(at least the ATA66 and ATA100,
don't know about raid editions) spit out CRC errors on longcables. i've had it happen to me 3 times sofar. on both linux
and freebsd. crc errors are nothing too serious but i don't like
to see the errors at all. once replaced with an 18" cable the
drives/cards work fine. (seen the errors on both ata66 and ata100,
using both IBM and seagate drives).
i have a buncha 32" cables(at least they seem that long, haven't
actually measured) in my 3ware systems and have never seen
a crc error reported.
be sure to use good drives. i avoid ibm drives like the plague now
having had 14 drives fail in the past 6 months(about to RMA
a 30GB drive right now actually). really too bad i used to like
IBM. When my drives first started dieing on the 3ware systems i
thought it was 3ware's fault till i startedhaving drives die
in sun systems, in pentium 4s, in my systems at home..at a very
alarming rate, led me to conclude that the drives were just crap(the
one i am replacing now i replaced in august originally, august
of THIS year).
nate
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