On Thu, 2004-09-16 at 13:01, Austin Theen wrote:
> I was going to spec a 3ware, but anything with more than 4 ports pretty
The 3Ware Escalade 8006-2 is a 2-channel SATA card.
The 3Ware Escalade 8506-4/8/12 have 4/8/12 SATA channels, respectively.
> much requires a PCI-X slot. Which is not available on my server.
64-bit PCI and PCI cards work in 32-bit PCI slots.
The only issue is 3.3V v. 5V cards/slots.
_All_ 3Ware cards I've seen work in _both_ 3.3V and 5V slots.
> I spent a good 3 days looking for a suitable 4 port SATA controller
> that had good linux drivers in a PCI 2.2 / 2.3 card. There just aren't
> any.
3Ware's 3w-xxxx GPL driver has been in the stock kernel since 2.2.15
(yes, 2.2). The new 3w-9xxx driver for the 9000 series has been in
2.6.5 (or 2.6.6?).
Since the 3Ware card is a real, intelligent RAID card, all the "brains"
is in the firmware, drive by its on-board 64-bit ASIC. As such, the GPL
driver becomes simple to write, because it's just a simple block
driver. No "proprietary vendor" code is in it (that's the firmware).
3Ware also has started to support open Linux monitoring interfaces, like
the SMART control. E.g., they have modified their code so it can do
reporting to smartd. Otherwise, 3Ware has its own utilities in 3DM
(which are quite good IMHO0.
This is different than with the "FRAID" cards which are 100% software
driven. All of the "RAID logic" is in the driver, hence why they are
binary-only. Not so much because of the vendor, but because HPT,
Promise, SiliconImage, etc... license the code from a 3rd party.
In the case of those "FRAID" cards, it's better to use the underlying OS
LVM/MD capabilities, I agree. For more on a comparison of intelligent
v. RAID v. OS LVM storage, see Sys Admin April 2004:
http://www.samag.com/articles/2004/0404/
> got any links? I've never seen 3 drive cages. Might be useful.
The RDC-300 (3 in 2x5.25"), certified by both 3Ware and Promise (among
others).
The RDC-400 is the equivalent of what your used to (4 in 3x5.25").
> I thought those were for the ultra 320 scsi drives? Did enlight finally
> make SATA cages?
Yes, same base model. The SATA version is $150 (U320 is $225).
http://us.enlightcorp.com/products/server/detel.php?kind=servercases&serial=51
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