Re: how 'supported' are 3ware Escalade controllers?

At 01:20 AM 01/09/2004, Brian Reichert wrote:

>This page says there is support for other cards in this family, but
>doesn't explicitly cite the 7506-8, and cites some firmwar issues:
>
>   <http://people.freebsd.org/~msmith/RAID/#3ware>

The above URL is out of date.  The 3ware people have been very helpful as 
of late providing official driver support. I have also had to open a ticket 
with them in the past and they did indeed provide official FreeBSD support 
on the phone and web (it was for their management daemon)

That being said, the critical part for me is performance and reliability. I 
have been using various 3ware cards for some time and I have had VERY good 
results with them and I highly recommend them on Intel platforms. (i.e I 
have zero experience with them on the AMD64).  We use them on FreeBSD, 
LINUX and Windows.

Most of our deployments are 2 drive RAID1s but I have a number of busy 
application servers running RAID10 (mail/pop3 and another SQL), RAID5 
(offsite backup) and RAID0 (news spools).  I have only had one card (out of 
~ 50 in 4yrs) go bad and that was out of the box.

If you are putting together a new system, I would look at the SATA series 
of their cards, the 8000.  I dont have any experience yet with their newer 
generation 9000 cards and they use newer drivers so I dont know how well 
tested they are. However, the older 7506-8 we are currently using in our 
pop3 server has been working very well for us for the past year.

It has 4 drives in RAID 10 and 2 drives in RAID1. The firmware we are using

Monitor version: ME7X 1.01.00.038
Firmware version: FE7X 1.05.00.063
BIOS version: BE7X 1.08.00.048
PCB version: Rev4
Achip version: 3.20
Pchip version: 1.30-66
Model: 7506-8
Unit count: 2

Lately we have been using Seagate Drives.  I would stay away from Maxtor as 
I have seen reports of problems with those drives.

         ---Mike