From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ed W Subject: Re: HBA Adaptor advice Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 08:33:28 +0100 Message-ID: <4DD61948.8050302@wildgooses.com> References: <4DD50C89.8060006@wildgooses.com> <20110520020853.GC4759@bitfolk.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20110520020853.GC4759@bitfolk.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 20/05/2011 03:08, Andy Smith wrote: > Are there actually any HBAs that have BBU without using their RAID > features? > > I'd like to stop using hardware RAID but I can't give up the BBU and > write cache. This is a very interesting question. Does anyone know if say the Areca ARC-1880ix-24 can be used in the same way, ie battery backed JBOD type mode? I received a recommendation offlist that the various 3Ware SAS 9750-xx cards can be used easily as a bunch of single drives, however, comparing the photos of these with the LSI MegaRAID 9280-xx they seem identical? (Presumed to be identical?). Anyone know why LSI sell an identical card under the 3ware brand (still)? Curiously I see the LSI generally selling a little cheaper than the 3ware in the uk... (wierd) Are there any cards to avoid because they *can't* be used in this way? eg Dell PERC6 seem to come up cheaply on ebay - can these be used as BBU backed single JBOD controllers? I guess the limitation is that some of these cards can only create a small number of arrays and/or they don't use their writeback cache efficiently in the case of multiple arrays? Thanks for any education here. (I found a cheap Areca on ebay, plus been eyeing up the various cheap Dell PERC cards...) Ed W