Bharath's Linux blog

We use RAID 5 using 3ware Escalade 8506-8 for a file server in our lab. RAID appears to be great as long as it works. But it can also turn out to be a nightmare when things go bad. We had drives crash in our RAID server. Since we are using RAID 5 we have 6 drives in the array and 2 hot spare drives. Here we have 2 spare drives and we had one drive that had already crashed and well since the notification system had not been setup because when got the storage the distributor gave us only 32bit version of the monitoring system, we were running 64bit operating system. We never got any indication that the system RAID array was in a degraded state. Well guess what happened next one more drive failed and down went our RAID array and along with it went our data. We lost quite a bit of data. Well now I have the 3ware Disk Management system running and monitoring the array and sending notification if anything goes wrong. We have our replacement drives in and well we have one more drive that needs to be replaced and after that we will have array all set once again. Well you think you paid a lot of money to get a great RAID card well to tell you the truth 3ware Esclade 8506 isnt the best RAID controller around. They dont do have native SATA support, its just 63bit 66MH PCI 2.2 controller. Its not even a PCI-X controller. It doesnt support RAID level migration. On the whole its not a great card for the price that you pay.