Niggles and Idiosyncrasies
The 5 Port HPM-XA is not without its foibles.
For starters, changing the RAID level is a royal pain. The jumpers supplied with the controller are the traditional large jumpers, but lack the pull tab that would make removal and insertion easier in the confined space. Levering out the jumpers is made more complicated by the buzzer situated on one side of the jumper set, and the pins for the drive status LEDs on the other.
Furthermore, the procedure for changing the RAID level requires 3 or more power on and power off cycles. The first resets the controller, the second sets the RAID level, and the third is to "lock" the RAID level by disabling further unexpected changes. While this does reduce the chances of someone accidentally reconfiguring the adapter, the combination of the fiddly jumpers and the complicated reset sequence made reviewing the controller difficult.
Ideally the jumpers could be replaced with DIP switches or a combination of jumpers and a rotary dial to select the RAID level. Even relocating the jumpers alongside the LED outputs would improve matters.
More worrying however was the lack of feedback from the onboard buzzer when a drive was deliberately removed from the array while it was running. The loss of the disk was sounded by a series of beeps for the first 3-5 seconds, and followed up 30 seconds later with another round. There was no sound after that. If a disk fails in the middle of the night, you're relying on the LEDs to alert you of the failure.
An embedded RAID controller needs to be more proactive about alerting. Beep every 30 seconds to a minute until the disk is replaced. Even better - play a siren sound every minute. Because six beeps at 3am is not enough.
Finally the LEDs - the activity LEDs are the reverse of normal drive LEDs. The default state is ON, not off, and activity is shown by briefly flickering the LED off. This matches the behaviour expected for hot swap drive bays, but might confuse a person the first time they see it. It would have been nice to see this mentioned in the two pages of documentation. The rows of pins for the LEDs are excellent, however, for dual-color LEDs. One cable with 3 wires can show power, activity and failure on a single LED light.
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|70.114.239.xxx |2009-12-30 06:46:59 outcast2k - product review gaps?good start on covering some of the basics. some other detais that would be good to know:
1) how long does a RAID rebuild take?
2) how do you tell how far a rebuild has left?
3) how do you tell which disk failed?
4) does the software UI handle 2+ HDM-XA's in the system?
5) how do you recover the RAID if the HDM-XA itself has failed and needs to be replaced?
6) what's the biggest sized drives supported? 2TB?
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|219.90.134.xxx |2010-03-07 23:17:32 TERRABYTEONE - ?? 3132 pciex1 card max output is 190mb/seciv tested this.. etc..
sil 3132 pci-e x1 card )(addtronics one) or jmb 363 or highpoint 4 port x1 2300 raid card.
max oot put is 190mb sec total.. and if using 2 ports its 95mb/sec..
tested this using 4x volir wd 300g hdd
(they get each 109mb/sec)
so if using both e-sata ports.. transfer maxes out at 190mb.sec..
if using 4 hdd in raid 0 etc... max output for 4x vr 300 on intel on-board raid (x48 chipset) 500+mb/sec..
on sil using this product is.. 90mb/sec.
als tryed 4x 1.5 tb 7200.11 hdd..max out at 90mb/sec
also tryed raid 5.. 90mb/sec.
2tb hdd supported. but hardware or nonhardware raid the sil raid gear does not support partitions bigger than 2tb.(old design)
to get 6 tb hdd spac out of in i raid 0 (4x 1.5tb)
i hd to make 4 partitions .. the software is limited in what size to make. it..it was tricky.. i had to make partitin/volumns 2+ then delet and recreat smaller ones. in aparticular order.
they need to update thar raid cards. (chan...
Thanks for the great write up!