6.0 on Dell 1850 with PERC4e/DC RAID?

[David Kirchner]

On 1/13/06, Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko at ambrisko.com> wrote:
> I'd suggest whining to them.  To me "optimal" means "as far as I know
> there are no problems with the RAID".  If enough customers whine they
> might change their view!

heh. When we've told Dell that some of our 1750s and 1850s were
locking up randomly, with various errors (most common, either the mpt0
driver complains and never recovers, or the server locks up entirely
with no error), we're told that a) FreeBSD isn't supported and b) to
run the diagnostics disk (which never finds anything except that the
CD ROM drive is empty) which basically leads to the implied c) to piss
up a rope.

Dell cares not about us FreeBSD users.

Better to just go with known-working hardware like 3ware cards. I do
wish they had a SCSI RAID controller. Seems like all major SCSI RAID
cards have various problems: Adaptec 2100S(and the rest in the line)
would not rebuild transparently -- the OS would get various timeout
errors while rebuilds or verifies were ongoing; Mylex's FreeBSD driver
has 2.5 year old bug i386/55603; and then these Dell cards (LSI?) have
obvious problems. I'm sure there are others I've missed.

3ware cards in Supermicro servers (not sure which exact models,
Silicon Mechanics sells them as their R200, R204, Q500, and others)
are rock solid for us even during rebuilds and with degraded arrays.
And the best part is they're not Dells.</educated_bias>