[6.0-RELEASE] Trouble with Intel-SATA-RAID Controller

[Raphael H. Becker]

Hi again,

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 08:33:26AM -0800, David Kirchner wrote:
> On 1/13/06, Mike Tancsa <mike at sentex.net> wrote:
> > The Areca is higher in price as they only come in 4 ports and
> > above.  Go with the 3ware 8006 2 port. If you are looking for
> > stability and reliability under FreeBSD, its the way to go. I have
> > recovered from many failed disks with the 3ware under FreeBSD, Linux
> > and Windows and it works and works well.
> 
> Seconded (or n'd). We have dozens of 3ware cards in service and
> they've all been great. From 8006 all the way to 9500S. Other than the
> occasional problem with >2TB on FreeBSD the cards and the drivers
> themselves appear absolutely solid.

JFYI / JFTR: The 8000 series of 3ware has a GRAPHICAL BIOS and IS NOT
USABLE with serieal-redirection. We have some troubles with weak drives
and cannot manage the controller using serial redirection interface of
the server.

3dm2 is a very nice webfrontend for the controller, but if your system
resides on it, you cannot swap/reconfigure/destroy/build RAIDs with it.
(I think about setting up a USB-stick with a "FixIt" and some daemons as
a fallback.)

Another thing: we've RAID1 with this controller and the RAID degraded
due to a timeout or another error of drive0. Rebuilding the RAID with
this disk is extremly slow, the write-access to the RAID is about
1.5MB/sec. After some days of rebuilding it breaks without any notice in
error-log or in kernel messages. Unit0 is "degraded on drive0", but the
status for drive0 is "OK" even with drive1. Very weird.

Regards
Raphael Becker