Linux RAID 3ware

January 9, 2006 7:31 AM

I would like to use a 3ware 8006-2L RAID controller for Linux. apparently it is really great and it looks like a true RAID - and no drivers or special setting needed. Anyone out there with experience or comments?
posted by bright77blue to computers & internet (8 answers total)

I use that exact controller on my Debian Linux server at work, and it works beautifully. It has two Western Digital 250 gig SATA drives on it doing RAID 1, and it performs very well. No problems at all. Highly recommended.

The controller itself shows up as a scsi controller, with one drive. Couldn't have been easier to set up, and this from a person with no previous RAID experience whatsoever.

Remember to download and install the binary 3ware client so you can monitor the status of the RAID.
posted by dotreptile at 8:28 AM on January 9, 2006

Yeah, those things are awesome. It's been several years, so when I used them I was using the plain IDE versions, the ones to get now are the SATA ones, which I gather that one is. We'd use a couple of those cards per box, to get 8 drives, making REALLY cheap terrabyte storage systems.
posted by RustyBrooks at 8:50 AM on January 9, 2006

I don't know anything about 3ware, but in regards to RAID on Linux in general: I set up an (older, IDE) Rocketraid 1640 controller on my Slack box and it was really easy. They often come with their own BIOS which makes configuration a breeze.
posted by ori at 9:52 AM on January 9, 2006

linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

no problems in linux (if you have the money there are better adapters)
posted by suni at 10:16 AM on January 9, 2006

(better meaning higher performance and some nifty features)
posted by suni at 10:18 AM on January 9, 2006

For the price the 3ware cards are impossible to beat.

The 3ware monitor program leaves a bit to be desired but anything useful is going to spit out to the console log anyway (a drive being dropped out of the set, etc).

Highly recommended.
posted by ordu at 12:12 PM on January 9, 2006

It *is* a true RAID - the card does all the heavy lifting. I highly recommend the 3ware cards. I'm a Gentoo user and have even found their tech support to be helpful, despite the fact that they don't officially support Gentoo.

The 3ware folks are great. The cards are well worth the extra dough you'll spend.
posted by drstein at 1:17 PM on January 9, 2006

Don't have much to add here, other than the fact that I've been using 3ware raid cards for over 3 years on extremely high-volume servers with no issues. The first server had a 7500-4LP and now I'm using a 3ware 9500S-4LP. The first server (with the 7500) was under constant hard disk access for the better part of a year and handled it quite nicely, even after one of the disks in the (RAID 10) array failed about halfway through the year.

The drivers are already in the kernel in most installations, but I would still recommend getting the latest driver/firmware so that you can use the CLI and other utils.
posted by helios at 3:31 PM on January 9, 2006