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  1. #1

    How often does your raid card failed?

    Hi Guys,

    I am building an onapp san going to run opene

    Currently it has been spec out with single raid card. I am wondering how often you have face with a failed raid card?

    I am using Adaptec 8-port MaxIQ RAID Controller

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
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    I have had bad luck with some failing in a few months but most last us until it's time to upgrade everything with the system environment we have.

    I have never used the more budget cards but running onapp san with one raidcard doesn't seem the best to me.

    Are you trying to build a cloud with onapp or just a san based VPS environment?

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Aug 2007
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    I usually have to replace raid cards every quarter.

    JK

    RAID card can die, but its not usual... I would have a spare available, and also either backups or a spare SAN with sync
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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2006
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    In 7 years only one problem, I've always used 3ware and Areca. Now I use Adaptec I hope continue with the same luck.

  5. #5
    Join Date
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    I've got a mix of 3ware, Adaptec, Intel, and LSI(non 3ware). I've had quite a few failures across the board, but adaptec ZCR(the supermicro kind) have had the worst issues. I've normally had recoverable failures on the others. I've had 2 non recoverable failures on 3ware but it was partially drive faults, or so I thought at the time. A couple weeks later 3ware came out with a firmware to fix error son certain drives that may have been what caused my problems (saying SMART/Drive error when no other source saw that and rejecting to use, among other things, from my recollection of it, been a while).

    I'd say overall, make sure you have good backups, and spare cards, one day something will fail, and RAID is NOT a backup

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Sep 2010
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    We've always used a mix of LSI and 3ware controllers, and while I've seen a small percentage come in DOA, I've never had to replace one.

    However, as Stephen said, RAID is not a backup. I have been through an array failure (due to too many disks failing), and it does ruin the day. Several of us spent the next 20 hours restoring backups.

    Ideally, if you're going to be storing critical systems, you should really build two systems, each with its own array. And then mirror them.

    Or, for not a whole lot more, you can pickup something like the HP MSA2000. An entry level SAN, that you put two controllers in, with auto fail-over. (And then get a second, and mirror) Uptime is a good thing.

  7. #7
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    Running lots of raid systems, we get to build up stats on failure|fault rates. Array failure is a lot more common than card failure though.

    ~8% of cards need replacing within the server lifetime (3 years)

    And just in case you missed it in earlier posts
    RAID is NOT a BACKUP
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  8. #8
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    Very rarely do we have a RAID card failure, but it is the type of failure where you don't want to be scrambling around looking for a replacement - you may find the card is no longer available, or that no one has any stock in your country... and so on, so try to make sure you have an identical spare just in case.
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  9. #9
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    I've seen RAID cards get flaky (very rare), but I never saw one bricked.
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  10. #10
    The most unrecoverable issues reported to us were from adaptec. We try to avoid using it. I absolutely agree with inerail-chris. Check out http://www.huaweisymantec.us/solutio...rage-solutions

    For now i think it's the best solution if to count on price per feature per quality. Very solid. It's a new company to american market, but very big and experienced guys out of US.

  11. #11
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    Rarely.

    Out of the 100's of servers here, I rarely see a fault due to the raid card / controller.
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  12. #12
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    Sadly raid controllers are one of the things we se die more than any other component.

    We have easily seen over 200 controllers die. By die I mean they start becoming intermittent where the controller stops responding (rejecting I/O to offline device) and the machine has to be powercycled sometimes has fs corruption and or array gets eaten.

    We have seen a huge number of bad controllers with 3ware, LSI, and areca.

    The areca controllers ran flawlessly for 1.5 years until they just started randomly failing. In all cases replacing the controller fixes the issue. It took months working with areca to finally verify an issue and get them to fix our cards, of course by that time we bought in excess of 100 extra cards which we didn't need =(.

    The areca problem is specific to *some* of the ARC-1222/1212's so if you don't use that model you probably won't see problems. Also I think we see soo many issues as these are all shared servers that run really heavy disk I/O 24/7.

    Areca controllers have been the best in not eating the arrays though, also the easiest to recover and the fastest. Considering they were flawless (in reliability) for 1.5 years I still think they are my favorite brand. Both LSI and 3ware would randomly eat arrays sometimes when the controller crapped out or even when it didn't.

    Also 3ware performance is so horrible they aren't even worth looking at (atleast their older generation cards before LSI bought them).

    We had about a 20-25% failure rate of LSI cards too and half of them failed out of the box. Basically when setting up a new server they would crap out when doing a mkfs. Atleast this never happened with Areca. All the controllers were pretty similar in cost to.

  13. #13
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    I've had to physically replace one raid controller in my life, where as I've seen numerous drives fail.
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  14. #14
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    LSI - We have RMAd a number of LSI cards for experiencing "fatal errors" - basically, RAID controller has an onboard kernel panic and the system falls over. Quite nice when you are running a 8-16 drive RAID10 system that's a hypervisor for a bunch of virtualized guests.

    Adaptec - We have a number of RAID failures on Adaptec cards, but the cards themselves seemed fine afterwards.

    Areca - We had to RMA a good number of their 2 port cards because of bad checksum issues. Areca isn't a very responsive company to deal with, either.
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  15. #15
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    I'm a 3ware kind of guy and in the 3 years that I have been using their cards, I have yet to have all but one fail. Like the other folks posting here, I'd also like to recommend to at least have one spare available per server with an active array.

    Also, 90% of RAID failures occur with failing disks. Be sure to check your drives once in a while for any evidence of failure. You can use smartctl or even the tw_cli application can show some evidence of failure.

  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by NJ Customs View Post
    I'm a 3ware kind of guy and in the 3 years that I have been using their cards, I have yet to have all but one fail. Like the other folks posting here, I'd also like to recommend to at least have one spare available per server with an active array.

    Also, 90% of RAID failures occur with failing disks. Be sure to check your drives once in a while for any evidence of failure. You can use smartctl or even the tw_cli application can show some evidence of failure.
    Not the experience I have had. I would say 85% of failures are the controllers (hardware) and probably about only half of the 'lost arrays' (not a controller problem) are due to bad disks.

    Funny enough I have seen *a lot* more raid10 failures due to the drive its reading off of also starts failing rather than 3 disks fail and the array survives. Raid6 seems to be a lot more robust than raid10 from my experience.

  17. #17
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    we routinely install 50+ hardware RAID cards a month. perhaps 80% adaptec, 20% 3ware, and very, very occasionally Areca or LSI megaraid.

    the raw count of bad RAID cards in our "return-to-vendor" bin, 3ware has been consistently more than adaptec despite we used easily 4 times more adaptec's. especially true after LSI took over 3ware brand a while back...
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  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by cwl@apaqdigital View Post
    we routinely install 50+ hardware RAID cards a month. perhaps 80% adaptec, 20% 3ware, and very, very occasionally Areca or LSI megaraid.

    the raw count of bad RAID cards in our "return-to-vendor" bin, 3ware has been consistently more than adaptec despite we used easily 4 times more adaptec's. especially true after LSI took over 3ware brand a while back...
    HAHA ok well adaptec was the *one* other major brand I didn't have experience with. I guess I know now they are not at all reliable either. I hope you aren't using ARC-1222's or after a year of use you will start seeing them fail left and right.

    3ware seems to have been pretty good at holding up after we burned through all the bad cards. Haven't had a controller failure on them in a long time and we stopped deploying servers with almost 3 years ago. We still have LSI cards go bad here and there and we stopped using them about 1.5-2 years ago.

    The LSI cards in dell machines seem to be better though? We have had much fewer of dell branded LSI cards fail on us and we recently switched to tell for all our servers (from supermicro).

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