4-STABLE and 3Ware 9000 series controllers

[Jason Thomson]

We have a one machine with a 9500S-4 controller in RAID 10 configuration.

Performance in RAID10 configuration is subjectively no different to the
7506-4 in RAID10. (Both cards seem excellent with similar disks - WD
200GB / 8MB cache drives).  We haven't done any systematic testing.

AFAIK the real advantage for the 9000 series cards is for RAID5 arrays.

A few caveats:

1.  The firmware is included in the driver.  The driver will update the
card's firmware if the driver has more recent firmware than the card.
The firmware that came with the 4-STABLE driver at the beginning of
August was quite old;  we had to kldload a more recent driver from the
3ware website in order to complete the install.

2.  We haven't been able to get 3dm2 working on this machine.  (But the
CLI does work).  We haven't spent a huge amount of time on it yet - but
do want to get it working to remotely monitor the array / generate
alerts.


If anyone has got 3dm2 working with FreeBSD 4.x I'd be really interested
to know.


Albert Chin wrote:

> Anyone having good results with 4-STABLE and the 3Ware 9000 series
> controllers?
>