Not all RAID cards are made the same. This is especially true for SATA raid. I have deployed over 2 dozen SATA & IDE RAID servers in recent history (mainly SATA, but a few IDE box’s). My recent opinion of them is that they work great until the break. When they break they break hard. You begin to wonder if RAID ever worked right when dealing with SATA RAID. Then you go back to an HP (or even Dell) SCSI RAID server and after 10 minutes of using it, you feel like you found religion or something.
I have used Promise & Adaptec 2 & 4 drive SATA Raid cards and both kind of suck. I have used many Adaptec cards on numerous servers and I have had nothing but problems with them. Today marked the 4th 4 drive 2410SA card that has killed a server. Hey Adaptec, when a RAID card capable of RAID5 loses a drive, it is supposed to continue to function. That is the whole idea of RAID5. Not sure if you know that from the performance of your cards. When losing a drive (1 out of 4 btw) the RAID array is supposed to stay up, the server should continue to function, and when you reboot you are not supposed to have a blank configuration on your card.
Also is it written somewhere that I cannot find that says the 1210SA card does not support hot swappable drives? Because if I buy a server that allows for hot swappable drives, I expect my RAID card (even if it is a cheap SATA card, hey it is still RAID) to like rebuild when I put a new drive in a machine. Oh and it would be really nice if the card would rebuild without being told to. I mean Dell, & HP cards do that. Why do I have to invoke a rebuild every time we have a bad drive?
I will be honest I was surprised that I have had such problems with the Adaptec cards since I am generally a fan of their products. I just don’t know if SATA RAID is not fully baked in general? I have been a fan of SATA for a while. it is a great cheap alternative to SCSI, but a RAID system should be reliable. I can understand if you lose drives quicker on a cheaper SATA system, and that happens all the time for me compared to SCSI drive systems, but the problems I have been seeing go beyond just dead drives. So far the only cards I have seen that show signs of progress are the 3Ware 2 drive cards, and some new embedded RAID cards on HP SATA servers. Ironically Jayson tells me the HP cards are in fact Adaptec or Intel. Go figure.
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