On 16 Nov 2007 at 16:36, Pawel Veselov wrote: > Hi, > > I was wondering if the 3ware 8006-2LP is supported in 4.2. > The http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html page only lists 5x00, 6x00 and > 7x00 > as supported devices, but the man page says that 8000 is supported as > well. > > (just trying to find a cheap SATA hardware raid card...) > > Thanks ! > Pawel. >
Executive summary: Find another card or use soft-raid. The long answer: The redundancy provided by a RAID set is merely a stop-gap measure -- it allows to avoid a hard crash and perform the necessary maintenance on your terms (i.e. when it is more convenient). It is not a panacea against disk failure, which almost inevitably will eventually occur given heavy enough usage and/or harsh environmental conditions. Therefore, the health monitoring and any live maintenace capabilities provided by the card are probably its most important features. Unfortunately, due to pigheadedness of 3ware marketing team, neither of these capabilities are available to OSS -- they exist strictly in form of binary blobs for a very few platforms. Moreover, certain critical RAID functionality (e.g. background rebuild) has been moved from the card firmware and into the binary blob. Therefore, using one of these cards in a server you are flying TOTALLY BLIND. (BTW, even on their "supported" platforms they leave a lot to be desired: recently I've lost critical data during a cold reboot of a long-running server with a 3ware mirror set, as BOTH drives had developed serious hardware flaws that the card did not detect until the full reboot! Apparently they do NOT do SMART monitoring of connected drives...) --------------------------------------------------------- System Administrator [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bitwise Internet Technologies, Inc. 22 Drydock Avenue tel: (617) 737-1837 Boston, MA 02210 fax: (617) 439-4941
