3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Jason Giglio]

3ware has decided to discontinue their escalade series IDE RAID controller
cards.  The drivers were open source and in the kernel tree.

As a side note, all 7810 cards are being recalled due to possible data
corruption under heavy load.  7800 cards need a firmware upgrade also.  If
you have a 7000 series card in production, be careful!

http://www.3ware.com/products/EscaladeLetter.asp?Title=Product&subTitle=3&ImageNumber=2

--
Jason Giglio
Information Technology Coordinator, Smyth Companies, Bedford VA
Phone: 540-586-2311x113
e-mail: jgiglio@NOSPAMsmythco.com

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 02:19:42PM -0400, Jason Giglio wrote:
> 3ware has decided to discontinue their escalade series IDE RAID controller
> cards.  The drivers were open source and in the kernel tree.

OK, this sucks because I like those cards a lot.  Before I go out and
stock up on a bunch of them, is there anything else out there that works
as well and is supported by Linux?
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[rugolsky]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 09:09:40AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 02:19:42PM -0400, Jason Giglio wrote:
> > 3ware has decided to discontinue their escalade series IDE RAID controller
> > cards.  The drivers were open source and in the kernel tree.
> 
> OK, this sucks because I like those cards a lot.  Before I go out and
> stock up on a bunch of them, is there anything else out there that works
> as well and is supported by Linux?

Not that I know of; the other cards just don't seem to scale as well.
There are a number of comparative reviews to be found on the web.  See,
for example:
http://www.hardwarezone.com/php/pcodes/reviews.php3?_di=2&_c=10&_aid=2001-02-23+20:21:34

What a shame.

I have it on some authority that 3ware doesn't want to sell controllers
any more because they want to move upmarket into the storage arena
where there are better margins, and they don't want to compete against
other integrators using their hardware.

I really like my 7800.  At this point I guess I'm going to convert from
hard to soft RAID, on the theory that (unfixed) bugs in the firmware are less
likely to botch JBOD. 

Regards,

  Bill Rugolsky

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 12:52:59PM -0400, rugolsky@ead.dsa.com wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 09:09:40AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 02:19:42PM -0400, Jason Giglio wrote:
> > > 3ware has decided to discontinue their escalade series IDE RAID controller
> > > cards.  The drivers were open source and in the kernel tree.
> > 
> > OK, this sucks because I like those cards a lot.  Before I go out and
> > stock up on a bunch of them, is there anything else out there that works
> > as well and is supported by Linux?
> 
> Not that I know of; the other cards just don't seem to scale as well.
> What a shame.

I personally don't use teh 3ware raid features at all, I use the card
as a high performance interface to 4 drives and do my own backups
(I mirror each disk to /nightly, /weekly, and /monthly which is kind
of neat because you can do "$ diff foo.c /nightly/$PWD" and it works,
saves a lot of headaches).

Are there decent alternatives if all you want is a high performance
JBOD controller?
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm 

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Alan Cox]

> I really like my 7800.  At this point I guess I'm going to convert from
> hard to soft RAID, on the theory that (unfixed) bugs in the firmware are less
> likely to botch JBOD. 

Except for RAID5 the softraid is also likely to outperform a hardware raid
controller. With RAID5 its a CPU usage tradeoff

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 06:05:49PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > I really like my 7800.  At this point I guess I'm going to convert from
> > hard to soft RAID, on the theory that (unfixed) bugs in the firmware are less
> > likely to botch JBOD. 
> 
> Except for RAID5 the softraid is also likely to outperform a hardware raid
> controller. With RAID5 its a CPU usage tradeoff

Nod.  I tested both configurations when I first got the cards, and
RAID0 and RAID10 tests with a dual Athlon and the 3ware 7800 showed Linux
soft-RAID outperforming.  I didn't save the hard-RAID results, but the following
is from a private e-mail I sent early in the summer:

RedHat 2.4.5-10smp on dual-Athlon 1.2GHz, 1GB RAM
Soft RAID0 with 4 IBM 41GB 7200RPM ATA-100 drives, chunk size 32K
ext2 w/4K blocks:

Version 1.01c       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
Tyan Thunder    10G 68828  99 138838  75 47756  33 48848  90 116166  61 229.2   1
K7 1.2GHz           ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  1208 100 +++++ +++ 16883  94  1220 100 +++++ +++  4476  99

I've been using hard-RAID simply because I've been playing with ext3
and LVM, and eliminating MD was one less interaction to worry about until now.

   -Bill Rugolsky

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Jeff V. Merkey]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 06:05:49PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > I really like my 7800.  At this point I guess I'm going to convert from
> > hard to soft RAID, on the theory that (unfixed) bugs in the firmware are less
> > likely to botch JBOD. 
> 
> Except for RAID5 the softraid is also likely to outperform a hardware raid
> controller. With RAID5 its a CPU usage tradeoff


There's the promise RAID adapter, which we are switching to for our 
projects based on the distressing news that 3Ware is pulling the best
RAID controller off the market.

Jeff

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RE: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Ryan C. Bonham]

Laary,

The Adaptec 2400A IDE Raid Cards work under Linux, although you will need to
patch your kernel, the patch is available from Adaptec's website. 
It seems like work was being done to add support for the Promise RAID cards,
it seems like Alan had support in his tree, I might be wrong about that
though. Alan?

Ryan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Larry McVoy [mailto:lm@bitmover.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 12:10 PM
> To: Jason Giglio
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 02:19:42PM -0400, Jason Giglio wrote:
> > 3ware has decided to discontinue their escalade series IDE 
> RAID controller
> > cards.  The drivers were open source and in the kernel tree.
> 
> OK, this sucks because I like those cards a lot.  Before I go out and
> stock up on a bunch of them, is there anything else out there 
> that works
> as well and is supported by Linux?
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           
> http://www.bitmover.com/lm 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe 
> linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
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> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
> 

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Wilson]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ryan C. Bonham" <Ryan@srfarms.com>


> The Adaptec 2400A IDE Raid Cards work under Linux, although you will need
to
> patch your kernel, the patch is available from Adaptec's website.
> It seems like work was being done to add support for the Promise RAID
cards,
> it seems like Alan had support in his tree, I might be wrong about that
> though. Alan?

Unfortunately, the Adaptec cards underperform the 3Ware stuff in quite a few
tests.
My two main problems with the Adaptec cards: They don't offer an 8-port
model, and the prices are significantly higher than those of the equivalent
3Ware card..

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Alan Cox]

> Unfortunately, the Adaptec cards underperform the 3Ware stuff in quite a few
> tests.
> My two main problems with the Adaptec cards: They don't offer an 8-port
> model, and the prices are significantly higher than those of the equivalent
> 3Ware card..

All the other cards I've tried have been materially slower than my 4 port
3ware card - except software raid. The other cards seem to use onboard
i960's and those are visibly underpowered compared with the 3ware
architecture.

Alan

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Alan Cox]

> The Adaptec 2400A IDE Raid Cards work under Linux, although you will need to
> patch your kernel, the patch is available from Adaptec's website. 

Adaptec have released complete source code ?

> It seems like work was being done to add support for the Promise RAID cards,
> it seems like Alan had support in his tree, I might be wrong about that
> though. Alan?

We have partial promise and hpt support for their softraid in the -ac tree
and the basics pushed into Linus tree. Andre and Promise have sorted out
full access to promise info on this so we should see full promise softraid
support.

The Promise hardware raid (Supertrak100) is also supported in the ac and
Linus trees nowdays but I've never been happy with its price/performance 
personally.

Alan

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Fri, 5 Oct 2001, Alan Cox wrote:

> The Promise hardware raid (Supertrak100) is also supported in the ac and
> Linus trees nowdays but I've never been happy with its price/performance
> personally.

I see the six channel supertrack100 for about US$ 330 which is around the
price I was paying for 8 channel 6800's.

I guess I'll have to start investigating those. I'll miss the promise 3
ata drives in two 5 1/4" slot raid enclosures as well...

Seems like everytime you find something nice they go and discontinue it...

joelja

> Alan
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-- 
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Joel Jaeggli				       joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu
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Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Mike Panetta]

Maybe IDE RAID was never ment to be? ;-|

Mike

On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 10:21:28AM -0700, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
> Seems like everytime you find something nice they go and discontinue it...
> 
> joelja
> 
-- 

Re: 3ware discontinuing the Escalade Series

[Joel Jaeggli]

possible, but was kinda a compelling equation for us, the most recent
generation of our network attached storge for grants I work on was 1.8TB
(24 drives after you subtract loseing about 1/8 to  parity disks and the
three hot spares) for less than $8000(for the whole machine) using the
100GB maxtor 536dx's.

if I have to do it again with scsi, using 73GB u160 disks, it'll cost me
something like $24,000 just for the disk (using the same assumptions as
with the ide setup we get 32 drives) which is kinda out of my price range.

It cost more than $8K for the hp tape robot that provides us with
backup...

regards
joelja

 On Mon, 8
Oct 2001, Mike Panetta wrote:

> Maybe IDE RAID was never ment to be? ;-|
>
> Mike
>
> On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 10:21:28AM -0700, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
> > Seems like everytime you find something nice they go and discontinue it...
> >
> > joelja
> >
>

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joel Jaeggli				       joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Academic User Services			     consult@gladstone.uoregon.edu
     PGP Key Fingerprint: 1DE9 8FCA 51FB 4195 B42A 9C32 A30D 121E
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of
arms.  Karl Marx -- Introduction to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
the right, 1843.