NASLite Network Attached Storage

Recent developments seem to point to other causes of described behavior!
See this thread in NASLite-M2


After a period of intensive testing I have drawn the conclusion that the flagship 3Ware RAID card 9690SA-8I is not delivering as advertised.

This expensive card is sold without any warnings, and should be able to export a -let's say- 8 1 TB hard drive RAID-6 array of 6TB.
That is exactly what the NASLite's syslog reports. Recent extra testing with other cards confirm that NASLite has no problems with large arrays over 2 TB.

But: formatting that logical drive in NASLite leaves you with a pitiful drive of 1.6 TB.
Also trying to format the drive with Parted Magic's LiveCD did not work.

There has been a lot of support email vice-versa between 3Ware and me, and they did not come up with any solution or a plausible reason why. Their support is lazy, comes up with links to the KB that don't make sense.

The only one who came up with a smart assumption was Ralph H.:

“The kernel is in fact identifying the array as you described. The problem of the 1.6TiB formatted size is possibly the result of the motherboard BIOS not being able to allocate more than 2TiB per LUN”

These tests were made with an Intel D915PGN motherboard, with 2GB of 184 Dimm memory.
It is not known which Intel chipsets support arrays over 2TB.
Intel support is -to say the least- not really cooperative. Intel support sucks.

In stead of my RAID-6 plan, I am shifting back to two RAID-1 arrays, Rsyncing to two single disks, with one hot spare. DARN.

PieterB

I all fairness to both 3Ware and Intel you need to keep a few things in mind. First is that the card you have is in fact an item used in the server environment in a server motherboard. You are an end consumer trying to use it in a consumer motherboard. They tend to be dicks to people like you and I in such cases. I am not saying it is right, just saying it is.

I regards to your issue, I think you are going to have to jump up to some real server class hardware in order to use the card. There is a general difference in the BIOS for one in that they are tuned and developed for stability and compatibility over bleeding edge performance. I suspect that the 3Ware card wants to see something in the BIOS and the motherboard that your present setup is not giving it.

Mike

That is your statement and my conclusion. A similar statement is NOT present at the 3Ware website or the card's documentation. OK there is a motherboard compatibility list, but I am sure that that list is not complete.



I think so too. But that'll be a little later.

This post was just meant as a warning for too enthusiastically buying topnotch hardware, which doesn't fit the philosophy of NASLite: old(er) hardware make decent or even fast servers.

PieterB