3ware 9750-24i4e / Intel DP55KG - Initial thoughts

war9200

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 9, 2010
Messages
273
Good: Works with Intel DP55KG

Pros:Great 3ware/LSI support; email/web and phone. The card is compatible with drives from earlier 9650SE controllers, so no reformat is necessary if you swap out an older card with a newer one. Using existing 1TB RE3 drives from an older 3ware 9650SE-16ML, swapped card, booted, no problems. Maybe I am just lucky, I have not had any drive failures or data loss yet. Also own a 3ware 9650SE-4PML, use two RAID cards in my system, the 4-port and 24-port 3ware. For the 9650/9690 cards, make sure you are using the latest beta firmware, as if you reboot (at least on Intel DP55KG), the older 9650SE-4PML card would not re-initialize:

9650SE_9690SA_firmware_beta_fw_4.10.00.019.zip

Firmware Release 4.10.00.019

Summary of changes in this release:

SCR FIRM03219 Pchip reset interrupt not handled
SCR FIRM03220 Put parity segment to free state completely when deallocate unused parity segment

So far the 9750 series has been solid but have only had it in production for 4 days..

Cons: Did not order a BBU with this card, 3ware/LSI does not include a mount option for the BBU/battery.

In initial testing, it does not seem that much faster than the 9650SE-16ML:

bonnie++ -d /x/test -s 16384 -m p34 -n 16:100000:16:64

Average: bonnie++ run (total time) with ext4 and RE3 1TB drives:

9650-16PML: 11m 42s
9750-24i: 10m 3s

Does not come with cables (SINGLE/bare card) and not sure the KIT comes with the cables I needed (multi-lane to multi-lane).

Also ordered: 6 of these:
3ware SFF-8087 to Multi-lane SATA Forward Break-out Cable - CBL-SFF8087OCF-06M

Other:
6Gbps SATA+SAS, ready for drives over 2TB when they come down in price. If buying a desktop drive, make sure you can turn on error recovery via smartctl (5.40).

For 3ware:
smartctl -l scterc -d 3ware,0 -a /dev/twa0

Example with single disk:

List settings: smartctl -l scterc /dev/sda

Show information:

# smartctl -l scterc /dev/sdc
smartctl 5.41 2010-11-24 r3216 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

SCT Error Recovery Control:
Read: Disabled
Write: Disabled

Set it:


# smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/sdc
smartctl 5.41 2010-11-24 r3216 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

SCT Error Recovery Control:
Read: 70 (7.0 seconds)
Write: 70 (7.0 seconds)
 
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