Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 11:24:12PM +0300, Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote: > Zhen Xu, on 03/07/2010 02:23 AM wrote: > > I wonder how you can do NV_CACHE battery backed. The NV_CACHE in SCST > > is just the system memory/page cache. It is not the cache on the RAID > > card. You could have UPS hooked to the server running SCST. However, > > if the system failed (memory, hardware, or just seg fault) and you had > > to reboot without proper shutdown, the page cache will be lost. It is a > > very interesting setup that you wanted to do. I am interested if you > > have much success. > > IMHO, basically, a battery backed RAID card isn't anyhow fundamentally > different from a system with an UPS and possibility to clearly shutdown > on a power shortage. They both have internal power supply, battery, > system hardware, memory and software. The difference is only in the > number of components, hence probability of failure. I think a good > system with good hardware and dual power supply (they often fail on the > first time) should be hardware wise in the same order of magnitude cache > loosing failure probability as the RAID card. > I don't quite agree. If you have a RAID controller with battery backed cache memory, and the server shuts down, crashes, or you need to restart it for any reason, the cache contents will still be there after the reboot and all the data can be flushed to the disks from the battery backed memory. If you use server normal memory as a cache you can't really do the same, can you? -- Pasi