Raidtec FS3102?

[Francois Stark]

So here’s my experience with it…

– The fibre channel interface oes not support load sharing or fail-over yet. Plasmon are allegedly working on it.
– I lost one partition after an array shutdown caused by a firmware upgrade – had to reformat and recapture 60 tapes!
– The current firmware does not properly support the seagate 500GB drives. Guess what they sold me: an array filled with seagate 500GB drives – 6TB in all… What happens is that almost every time the array is switched off and on again, one of the drives just shows “not used”, and it is not part of a raid array anymore. 5 minutes later, the FS3102 starts rebuilding the raid array to it’s hot spare. Every time after a power=down, it is another drive that shows “not used”. I’m dreading the case where two drives are “not used”, because then all my data will be gone. Again.
Plasmon suggested I downgrade to a previous version of firmware, but I don’t trust that anymore. I’d rather keep the power up, and keep it running until they release new firmware that works properly with these drives.

So… this array is really not ready for prime-time yet.

Regards
Francois