Re: RAID card recommendation

Greg Smith wrote:
> Scott Carey wrote:
>> 9650 was made by 3Ware, essentially a PCIe version of the 9550. The
>> 9690SA
>> was from some sort of acquisition/merger. They are not the same
>> product line
>> at all.
>>
> 3ware became a division of AMCC, which was then bought by LSI. The
> 9590SA came out while they were a part of AMCC.
>
> I was under the impression that the differences between the 9650 and
> the 9690SA were mainly related to adding SAS support, which was sort
> of a bridge addition rather than a fundamental change in the design of
> the card. You'll often see people refer to "9650/9690" as if they're
> the same card; they may never run the same firmware. They certainly
> always get firmware updates at the same time, and as part of the same
> download package.
>
> Another possibility for the difference between Scott's experience and
> mine is that I've only evaluated those particular cards recently, and
> there seems to be evidence that 3ware did some major firmware
> overhauls in late 2008, i.e.
> http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/performance/2008-10/msg00005.html
>
>
> Let me try to summarize where things are at a little more clearly,
> with the data accumulated during this long thread:
>
> -Areca: Usually the fastest around. Management tools are limited
> enough that you really want the version with the on-board management
> NIC. May require some testing to find a good driver version.
>
> -3ware: Performance on current models not as good as Areca, but with
> a great set of management tools (unless you're using SAS) and driver
> reliability. Exact magnitude of the performance gap with Areca is
> somewhat controversial and may depend on OS--FreeBSD performance might
> be better than Linux in particular. Older 3ware cards were really slow.
>
> One of these days I need to wrangle up enough development cash to buy
> current Areca and 3ware cards, an Intel SSD, and disappear into the
> lab (already plenty of drives here) until I've sorted this all out to
> my satisfaction.
Most common SSDs will NOT come up on the 3ware cards at present. Not
sure why as of yet - I've tried several.

Not had the time to screw with them on the ARECA cards yet.

-- Karl