On Mon, 20 Jun 2005 16:58:10 -0400, Rob Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>3ware raid controllers don't have an audible speaker when a drive fails. > >What SATA raid card (>2 drives) is the easiest to deal with under errors? > >I hear the intel and ami(lsi) cards are recommended, but is it 6 of >one and a half dozen of the other? > >Is there anyway in openbsd 3.7 to tell when a drive failes? >Is there anyway in openbsd 3.7 to get the smart status of a drive >under the control of a raidcard? > >Thanks. Hmmm... The first question is what kind of SATA drives do you plan to run? You've got SATA/150 (a.k.a SATA-I) and SATA/300 (a.k.a. SATA-II). LSI makes a MegaRAID SATA/300 8 drive card that looks rather sweet but most of their other SATA offerings are SATA/150. The primary enemy of all hard drives is heat. Hard core testing done at EMC with both ``off-the-shelf'' desktop drives and ``enterprise'' drives shows that for every degree above the dead center average operating temp, your MTBF (mean time between failures) is decreased by 50%. In other words the hotter it gets, the sooner it will fail. End of story. Before you go asking for those faster spindle disks (7200 or 10K RPM), realize they put off a lot more heat than their slower brethren (5400 RMP). If you don't have a cooled server room and adequate case/drive fans, the extra speed is probably not worth it. Personally, I've got two OpenBSD systems deployed with LSI MegaRAID i4 cards (each with 8 ATA/100 disks). They work very well. The suggestion for this card came to me off list from another OpenBSD user subscribed here at the start of the year (Thanks!). Today, I bought a LSI MegaRAID ATA 133-2 card to run four 250GB Maxtor disks in RAID 10 (with big fans) as the "boot disk" for a OpenBSD workstation. -Excessive? Nope, I like stuff that will just sit and run forever but at the same time knowing in case something happens to go bad, recovery will be simple. Keep your eyes on -CURRENT. Work is being done on bioctl which will help with health monitoring. SATA/(P)ATA drives are really not something you want to try hot swapping. Yes, it can "supposedly" be done safely on some operating systems (not currently on OpenBSD) but it's really bad juju to do it. None the less, putting your SATA/(P)ATA disks in nice hotswap enclosures is a wise move. First of all, you get a nice fan (I love fans) on the disk and an enclosure designed for air-flow/cooling. Secondly, you get blinky lights (I love blinky lights). On high quality enclosures, you get a failure indicator that you can see. It's not an alarm buzzer but it's better than nothing. JCR
