wanted to give an update to anyone who was participating in those raid controller threads a few days ago ..
seems 3ware has another hardware related issue which i experienced first hand today. i planned on comming into work around 12 or 1..but got paged at 10:23 saying 2 of the services were down on my backup server(3ware raid), so i tried to ssh to it.. nothin..went to the office and saw it had kernel panic'd. reiserfs said buffer write failed and i saw a bunch of SCSI DISK: I/O errors with sectors. rebooted the system and the 3ware controller had marked one of my maxtor 80GB drives offline. contacted my vendor and they said that 3ware's controllers cannot handle bad blocks as reported from the IDE drives. if they encounter one it causes big problems(unlike a normal ide controller which just waits while the drive re maps it). i hooked the maxtor to the onboard intel controller and ran the diagnostics, drive checked out as being in perfect working order..re hooked it to the 3ware and re initialized the raid array(didn't lose any data, its just re integrating the drive into the raid10 array) and the system is fine again for now ...the vendor said 3ware is comming out with updated firmware to solve the issue. 3ware gave me a new unreleased driver today which they said will help with the problem but im havin trouble compilin the driver, waiting to hear back from their support team. so while they have decent quality drivers ....the hardware has many issues! amazing it has this many issues with the cards being available for so long. im very happy with their responsiveness though. even after today i would still choose 3ware over adaptec and promise raid controllers on the sole issue of better support. tho its sad that ive had more problems with the controller then without.. nate
