Hardware RAID controller questions - 3Ware vs RocketRaid

[Mike Tancsa]

At 04:37 AM 3/18/2010, Andy Wodfer wrote:
>Hi,
>We're setting up two backup servers where each server will have about 4TB of
>harddrives (for now) connected (4x1TB and 8x500GB drives). Last night we ran
>into trouble with the 3ware controllers we have (9650SE-8LPML) because we
>couldn't create a larger RAID5 than 1.99TB.


Are you sure its the controller that was giving that error ?  I ran 
into something similar with my Areca controller on a backup server. I 
ended up creating 2 raid sets, one for the boot OS and the other for 
the backup spool and used gpart for the larger than 2TB RS. Perhaps 
the same needs to be done on the 3ware

eg

# df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a    1.9G    496M    1.3G    28%    /
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/da1s1d     29G     10G     16G    39%    /usr
/dev/da1s1e     33G    5.0G     26G    16%    /var
/dev/da0s1d     61G     50G    6.4G    89%    /var/db
/dev/da2p1     2.6T    797G    1.6T    33%    /backup
zbackup1       2.7T    1.2T    1.4T    46%    /zbackup1

I would go for the 3ware over the RocketRaid.  We have used the 3ware 
cards for some time and they have been very reliable for us. The disk 
replacement process is well designed and has been reliable for us 
over the years. We also use some of the Areca cards and they have 
been good too.  Not much experience with the RocketRaid.

         ---Mike


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Mike Tancsa,                                      tel +1 519 651 3400
Sentex Communications,                            mike at sentex.net
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