Replacing a Mylex AcceleRAID?

[Andrea Venturoli]

Scott Long wrote:

>> So, I have a few questions:
>> _ is support for this card (mly driver) improved in newer versions? Is 
>> it working ok even on AMD64 platform? Are there any utilities to 
>> manage it through the OS?
> 
> There hasn't been many changes to this driver in several years.  I
> haven't tested it on amd64, and I know that it cannot reliably handle
>  >4GB of RAM, so you'd be at very high risk if you used it.

This should not be my case anyway.



> There was a simple tool for querying status that was floating around a
> few years ago (if I'm remembering the correct controller).  I can try
> to dig it up if you're interested.

I've put "camcontrol devlist" in my daily periodic: this shows the RAID 
as being online or critical and detects *most* problems. Watching the 
log throgh logcheck or whatever is mandatory anyway.
If you have anything better, I might be interested, since I have another 
server with the same card which is going to live for still a long time.



>> _ any hint or recommendation for a replacement card which will 
>> possibly stay on the market for a while and has an OS management 
>> interface?
> 
> Depends on what you're looking for.  Things have changed since the old
> days of SCSI controllers.  Are you looking to stay with SCSI, or are you
> looking to move to SATA?  What about SAS?  There are
> cost/performance/reliability tradeoffs there.

We are staying with SCSI, since the disks are good and provide what we 
want. The controller could be good too, if it wasn't for those two minor 
problems I described earlier.
BTW, I know SATA, altough I still have to work with a decent RAID card, 
but I don't know what SAS is. Can you briefly tell?

  bye & Thanks
	av.