On Nov 17, 2008, at 3:43 AM, Danny Carroll wrote:
Matt Simerson wrote:
Allow me to introduce you to Marvell. The sell the SATA controller
used
in the Sun thumper (X4500). I've used that same SATA controller under
OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. Unfortunately, that controller doesn't use
multi-lane cables. When you pack in 3 controllers and 24 disks,
it's a
cabling disaster.
http://freebsd.monkey.org/freebsd-fs/200808/msg00027.html
Interesting. Wish I had seen it before. To be honest I did consider
this board but I was really in favour of PCIe over PCIX. That might
have been a mistake :-)
The Areca cards do NOT have the cache enabled by default. I ordered
the
optional battery and RAM upgrade for my collection of 1231ML cards.
Even
with the BBWC, the cache is not enabled by default. I had to go out
of
my way to enable it, on every single controller.
Are you talking about the Areca cache or the disks own caches?
Disk caching is a completely different animal, and one which I didn't
mention. I'm spoke only about the write cache on the controller. Mine
all arrived off by default, which is a VERY reasonable default
configuration. Page 97 of the manual says about it:
3.7.5.12 Disk Write Cache Mode
User can set the "Disk Write Cache Mode" to Auto, Enabled, or
Disabled. Enabled increases speed, Disabled increases reliability.
On my board it was enabled. But maybe mine was the exception.
Perhaps it's model specific, or your vendor configured it that way. Or
you got a return that someone else monkeyed with. I'm not going to
speak for Areca but it seems quite odd that Areca would ship them with
the cache enabled. I've used many hundreds of RAID controllers over
the years and without exception, every single one with a write cache
had it disabled by default.
Matt
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