Re: Perc 3 DC

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:41 AM, Simon Waters <simonw(at)zynet(dot)net> wrote:

> That said a couple of weeks back ours corrupted a volume on replacing a dead
> hard disk, so I'm never touching these cheap and tacky LSI RAID cards ever
> again. It is suppose to just start rebuilding the array when you insert the
> replacement drive, if it doesn't "just work" schedule some down time and
> figure out exactly why, don't (for example) blindly follow the instructions
> in the manual on what to do if it doesn't "just work".

Reminds me of a horror story at a company I was at some years ago.
Another group was running Oracle on a nice little 4 way Xeon with a
Gig of ram (back when they was a monster server) and had an LSI card.
They unplugged the server to move it into the hosting center, and in
the move, the scsi cable came loose. When the machine came up, the
LSI RAID marked every drive bad and the old 4xx series card had no
facility for forcing it to take back a drive. All their work on the
db was gone, newest backup was months old. I'm pretty sure they now
understand why RAID5 is no replacement for a good backup plan.

I had a 438 in a dual ppro200, and it worked just fine, but I never
trusted it to auto rebuild anything, and made backups every night. It
was slow (in the 30 meg/second reads on a 6 disk RAID 5, not faster in
RAID-10 for reads or writes) but reliable.

Newer LSI cards seem quite nice, but I'm now using an Areca 16xx
series and am so far very happy with it's reliability and somewhat
happy with its performance. Sequential read speed is meh, but random
performance is very good, so for a db server, it's a nice unit.