3ware raid

[Mike Tancsa]

At 04:30 PM 26/10/2004, Darren Pilgrim wrote:
> > Hello
> >
> > I was wandering if anybody out there has had any success using 3ware
> > 7506-8 cards with Freebsd 4.10. I  was previously using a Promise
> > controller SX6000, and was having problems with this card.
>
>This is something of a FAQ.
>
>There's a long list of people using 3ware 6/7/8xxx series cards in FreeBSD
>4.x boxes with great success.  AFAIK that extends to 5.x as well.

Yes, I am one who always seems to pipe up.  I use this very card 
specifically on a busy pop3/imap server.  The mail spool is made up of 4 
drives in RAID10 and 2 other ports are used for the base OS in RAID1.  Its 
been in service in this config for over a year without issue.

When it comes time to replace bad drives, all has worked as expected for 
us.  We dont use hot swap trays (dont really trust the electrical design of 
many of them), so we do it while powered down.  Literally, shutdown, pull 
the bad drive, put in the new, go into the BIOS (or you can use the cmd 
line tools), add the new drive to the RAID set, exit out and let it boot 
and thats it.  The controller rebuilds in the background and notifies you 
when done.

There were at some point a bad batch of 7000 series cards that needed to be 
RMA'd (perhaps 2+ yrs ago now ?).  But other than that one time hardware 
issue, they work great on all the platforms we have (i386 on FreeBSD, 
Linux, Win2k).

We also use most of the other cards, except for the 9xxx series which we 
have no experience with yet.

         ---Mike