Thank you, Ajay.
 
That's useful to me.
And do you know if the 3ware ATA raid card (7006-2 or 7506-4LP I suppose) flushes the disks in case of power failure or do they just forget the buffered datas so that the filesystem crashes afterwards ? (i.e. do they have a capacitor to hold the datas up to the moment they are all written). I will have a remote reboot (power failure like) that I might use quite often and I know this is no problems with ext3 filesystem on 1 IDE disk only (I made some tests), but is it the same reliability with this 3ware raid card for power failures ?
 
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience !
 
Daniel
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Ajay Sharma
To: dan1
Cc: CentOS@caosity.org
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 5:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Centos] Promise raid cards

dan1 wrote:

> I would like to know if promise RAID cards are compatible with CentOS /
> RHEL ?
> I have seen that only SATA is supported on the RHEL hardware
> compatibility list. The other ATA raid cards seems not to be compatible.
> They give source code and promise grants compatibility with RedHat 8 and
> 9 but not RHEL.

> I would like to know if somebody tried a ATA raid card like Fasttrack
> TX2000, SX4000, Fasttrack 100 TX2, etc..
> If you could share me your experience it would be great.

> My provider says that he had some bad experiences about that cards and
> he doesn't allow me to use CentOS on his promise cards he provides
> (only), so I cannot have RAID on my server... it's a shame..

I haven't checked recently, but the last time I played with any promise
controller it was a train wreck.  I then picked up a 3ware ATA RAID card
and never looked back.  It's well supported as the drivers are in the
main kernel tree since 2.4.  So you install your drives, setup the ATA
raid array in the 3ware bios and when you boot up it's detected as a
SCSI device.  It's the easiest solution out there, so IMO, it's well
worth the extra money.

--Ajay