[CentOS] Third-party SATA-RAID cards suggestions

[John R Pierce]

On 12/5/2013 7:56 AM, Keith Keller wrote:
>> The card should preferably be able to connect ten harddrives, but I guess
>> >three four-port cards should work as well. There's no need for anything fancy
>> >really, as long as I can create a single big software-raid on it at CentOS
>> >install-time.
> There's little reason to do that if you have a real hardware RAID card.
> (I won't say "no reason", but it would have to be extremely compelling
> for it to be wise to go that route.)
>

well, 3 4 port hardware raid cards wouldn't be able to make a single 
raid, you'd at best get 3 seperate raids, one per card, and when 
managing it, you'd need to track which drive is on which card.

re hardware raid cards, I've not had any issues using LSI 926x-8i cards 
(x = 0,1, different connector locations mostly), these are MegaRAID SAS2 
cards.  again, with a SAS expander on a single 4-channel connector, I've 
had as many as 36 SATA drives (in a RAID6+0, organized as 3 x 11 drives, 
plus 3 hot spares), and gotten very good performance.


-- 
john r pierce                                      37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast