Had a question the other day from a customer panicking about his hot spare situation. He was running a RAID 1E on 3 drives with a hot spare in a small database server - very sensible.
As is the way of hard drives, one went west. The hot spare did its thing and kicked in. The […]

Question to the Storage Advisors: Jo: We have here a number of servers with adaptec 4800 controllers managing SAS drives. What is the best way to improve (performance?)without investing lots and lots of money in a san solution. How can we proceed from here with Adaptec’s SSD caching technology?
Jo … I’m guessing that you have […]

(that’s a pun folks) …
Question to the Storage Advisors: Daniel: I have been looking at your SSD Caching Technology, specifically the 5805Q. My concern is that SATA3 6Gb/s is on the horizon. Is there a SATA3 6Gb/s version on the horizon? I would like to spend a bit more now on some future proofing. It […]

I’m talking about drives here, not interfaces.
A lot of my customers are getting all excited about our SSD caching technology … then run right off the rails and start thinking they can get away with using cheap SATA drives to run their system in combination with high-speed read caching.
Just hold the horses … what about […]

Question to the Storage Advisor: Artur: I’m running a 20 disk RAID 60 array with 1Tb enterprise drives and a couple hot spares, using a 512 stripe. Now I’m at the OS (linux) and it’s time to create an LVM for exporting via iSCSI and then format with EXT3 on the iSCSI receiving side. […]

Question(s) to the Storage Advisors: Greg: Enterprise HDD vs Desktop HDD vs Hardware RAID vs Software RAID using SATA expander technology in a massive drive system.
I understand that using desktop HDD’s in a RAID causes problems. Everything I have researched speaks to Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) related issues. I assume that everyone that repeats […]

Question to the Storage Advisors: Dave: I am currently working on a new project to consolidate several different NAS’s from different manufacturers that I have data on, while also increasing the fault tolerance of the system as a whole. In order to do this I am building a one-off server case that will have 120 […]

Question to the Storage Advisors: Craig: We are working out the design of a new storage server. We need space over speed in every possible way. This server is in effect near line storage. We want to use RAID 6 or 60. My question is how many disks is it recommended to have in a […]

Question to the Storage Advisors: Steve: concerning the 1430SA adapter … if I have 2 drives in a RAID 1 array, can I connect a 3rd and 4th drive that is not part of any RAID array?
Steve … yes. You can make a second array from those two drives, or you can have two individual […]

Question to the Storage Advisors: Tim: I am using the Adaptec Storage Manager to create one logical drive from 15 1TB drives using the clear method. It has been running for over 48 hours and has not finished yet. In 12 hours it had finished 85%, then over the next 24 hours it got another […]