Re: 3ware vs Areca

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Jeffrey Baker wrote:

> Debian "etch", which has a 2.6.18 kernel.  I have contacted Areca
> support (as well as the linux-scsi mailing list) and their responses
> are usually either 1) upgrade the driver and/or firmware even though I
> have the latest drivers and firmware

Well, technically you don't have the latest driver, because that's the one
that comes with the latest Linux kernel.  I'm guessing you have RHEL5 here
from that fact that you're using 2.6.18.  I have a CentOS5 system here
with an Areca card in it.  It installed it initially with the stock 2.6.18
kernel there but it never worked quite right; all sorts of odd panics
under heavy load.  All my problems went away just by moving to a generic
2.6.22, released some time after the Areca card became of more first-class
citizen maintained actively by the kernel developers themselves.

> 2) vague statements about the disk being incompatible with the
> controller.

That sort of situation is unfortunate but I don't feel it's unique to
Areca.  There's lots of reasons why some manufacturers end up with drives
that don't work well with some controllers, and it is hard to assign blame
when it happens.  There is something to be said for buying more integrated
and tested systems; ultimately if you build stuff from parts, you're kind
of stuck being the QA and that process presumes that you may discover
incompatible combinations and punt them out in place of ones that do.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD