[mythtv-users] OT: identify a 3ware SARA card? 8000 or 9000 series?

[Jeff Wormsley]

Stroller wrote:
> Do any of you recognise this one, please?
> http://i21.ebayimg.com/01/i/000/d2/8f/9ec5_1.JPG
> 
> It's allegedly a 12, and allegedly working, but the seller claims not  
> to know a model number & that there are no identifying markings on  
> the card. Any ideas?

It's an 8506-12.  I have the 8506-08 and it works wonderfully, and is 
immediately recognized and used by Fedora Core 3-7, CentOS 5.10, and 
Ubuntu 7.10 Server (the only OS's I've tested it with).  I run 8 250G 
drives with 7 in RAID 5 with the 8th a hot spare for just over 1.4TB. 
The only trouble I've had stemmed from keeping the machine in a room 
with no ventilation and the drives overheated causing a multi-drive 
"failure".  The drives were ok, but more than one got too hot at the 
same time and shut down, thus crashing the array, and thus losing all of 
the data.  Keep the drives cool and you shouldn't have this problem.  It 
isn't the fault of the card, at any rate.

Also, double check the 3ware site about the limitations of the firmware. 
  When I bought mine, the 8500 series would not support an array over 
1.5TB (hence my using 250G drives rather than 400's or bigger).  They 
may have updated the firmware to get past that limit, I don't know.  If 
not, you can always use it as a 12 port SATA controller and use software 
raid, but won't get any of the hardware raid advantages (and some people 
say there are none nowadays, I'm not qualified to know if they are wrong 
or right).

Jeff.

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