[LUNI] Adaptec vs 3ware

[Martin Maney]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 07:23:53PM -0500, Trev Peterson wrote:
> When I needed to get the aacraid management tools to work on Debian (for
> a Dell branded Adaptec card) I got to play with alien, wait on hold for
> support, and finally migrate everything to software raid.  This has been
> a fairly routine experience with closed sourced drivers to the point
> that I don't even consider closed source drivers/tools anymore (it's
> just not work the headache).

I basically agree with your stance, but I'm not sure I understand how
3ware is better than Adaptec wrt the openess of their management tools. 
At least for the PATA cards I'm still using, all the userland tools are
closed source (or if they're willing to slip you a copy of the source
it's not been obvious to me).

On the essentials, last time I looked Adaptec's RAID cards were either
boatanchors under Linux or worked only with a binary driver, so I've
never looked further at them.  Sounds like they've unbent a bit, but at
this point I have so much entirely positive experience with 3ware I'm
not sure I'd care unless they were, say, half the price.  In which case
I might have a hard time taking the product seriously, since everything
I've looked at in the past that was half the price was actually
proprietary software RAID.  :-/

-- 
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
  But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
  You never get rid of the Dane.  -- Kipling on MS Enterprise Licensing