On Tuesday 24 October 2006 03:47, K Kadow wrote: > I've inherited a half dozen Dell PowerEdge 2650s with the PERC 3/Di > Adaptec RAID controllers, mostly running old OpenBSD with the 'aac' > RAID controller enabled. > > I'd like to put as little money (and time) into these as possible > while still bringing them up to the latest supported OpenBSD release, > and keeping the Dell support contracts in place. I'm willing to > consider trading these in, but I don't see affordable rackmount > servers from Dell or Sun with redundant power and hardware RAID. > > These servers have been up and running for years (as in 1000 day > uptimes) without major issues, and with no complaints about > performance or corruption. How big a risk am I taking by reinstalling > these machines with 4.0 and a custom 'aac' kernel? > > Has anybody successfully paid or pressured Dell to swap the PE2650 > 'aac' motherboards for a revision with the AMI MegaRAID embedded RAID > chipset? Or added a PCI card for RAID using the "split backplane" > feature of the PE2650? > > If the latter is the best option, any recommendation for an > OpenBSD-friendly maker of standalone U160/U320 hardware RAID > controllers for PCI? Something orderable from CDW or another major > retailer would be a plus. > > > Thanks, > > Kevin > > (P.S. One reason for specifying hardware RAID is to have a system with > a strong chance of surviving (and/or rebooting after) a single failed > drive. Other reasons are primarily political, same reasons we have > only Sun and Dell hardware, and Dell "Gold" service contracts.)
As you have built in PERC 3/Di controllers.. use it! Otherwise buy anything else but adaptec (like LSI Megaraid).. The big aac update 1.16 of aac_pci.c just before OpenBSD 3.9 actually made aac usable. I have an old Dell 2450 with a built in PERC 3/Di running perfect since 3.9 release. I haven't read Ingo:s post reply yet that I have seen on the list. But I think we share the same opinion about adaptec as we are two out of many with earlier adaptec problems. Regards /Per-Olov
