On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 at 11:28am, Mattias Wadenstein wrote

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Mark Hahn wrote:

quoted

quoted

3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather
than either of the 9xxx series cards.

before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance:
expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
quite impressive...

I'd still recommend 3ware for the md case, because of reliability. For my 
6-disk raid a 8506-4 was actually slightly faster than two sil3114s running 
md raid5. The 3ware card has the additional advantage of not pushing the 
machine into a hard hang once per day or so when doing io over the raid 
layer.

That's exactly why I recommended them.  3w-xxxx has been in the kernel a 
*long* time and is extremely stable.  Sure, it's expensive for "just" a 
SATA controller, but not for a solid one that doesn't fall over at random 
times.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University