On Sat, 16 Apr 2005 at 1:11am, Franki wrote
I'm looking into setting up a SATA hardware raid, probably 5 to use with CentOS 4. I chose hardware raid over software mostly because I like the fact that the raid is transparent to the OS.
Does anyone know of any SATA controllers that are well tested for this sort of usage?
IMO, 3ware is far and away the best choice for true hardware SATA RAID. The 3w-xxxx driver (for the 8000 series boards) has been in the kernel for a *long* time, and 3w-9xxx driver (for the 9000 series) has been in a while as well. There are some better performers out there at the moment (Areka, for example), but their drivers are unproven.
FWIW, I currently have 4TB (2 servers) worth of 3ware based storage in production, and just took delivery of a new 5.5TB server.