Re: Choice of SAS controller

[Jukka Marin <jmarin%embedtronics.fi@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 05:52:28PM +0200, Edgar Fuß wrote:
> EF> What controllers are people here using in production?
> MB> I have LSI MegaRAID devices. One MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i, and also
> MB> D[e]ll PERC (PERC 5/i) controllers, which are [OE]M LSI devices
> Thanks.
> Are you using the RAID functionality or do you operate them in JBOD mode?
> If the former: How do you administer them? Have you ever been throug the procedure of replacing a failed disc? How stable accross controller versions is the on-disc format?

Just my $0.01: I have been using Areca RAID controllers for several years
now and I have been pretty happy with them.  I'm using RAID6 for normal
use and RAID1 for backups.  RAID6 write speed is currently 178 MB/s (xen
domU) and 244 MB/s (dom0), dd if=/dev/zero of=foofoo bs=1m count=4096

The controllers I'm using have a dedicated Ethernet port for configuring
the controller using a web interface.  (I think you can also do everything
on the host side if you want.  Never tried that.)  I have 2 GB RAM and
battery backup on the controller.

The controller starts using hot spare(s) automatically when disk(s) fail,
all I need to do is hot-swap the failed disks and insert new ones.
I have 16 pcs of 1 and 2 TB disks, 5 of them are hot spares.  I have had
several disk failures along the years, but so far, I have lost no data.
Once it was close when two disks failed almost simultaneously.. (using
RAID6 paid off.)

So far, all firmware updates have been compatible with the disk format.

  -jm