On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 18:29 -0800, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
Ugo Bellavance ugob@camo-route.com wrote:
Anyone tried netcell products
NetCell's RAID-XL is basically a fixed 32-bit (2+1 drive) and 64-bit (4+1 drive) [S]ATA RAID-3 implementation. Before I talk more about how RAID-XL works, let's talk RAID-3.
RAID-3 and RAID-4 use striped data with dedicated parity, whereas RAID-5 uses striped data and parity. RAID-4 and 5 stripe large blocks, so multiple access could be possible (reducing latency), whereas RAID-3 writes sectors immediate and [virtually] parallel to all disks.
<SNIP>
Since the NetCell is designed for desktops and direct I/O, it doesn't make sense to use a traditonal SCSI driver. There are no real services, queuing, etc... It's really best as a "dumb block ATA device" that is written to and read from directly. That's why it was designed to show itself as a 1 or 2 device ATA channel.
I'd like to know if it would be possible to install CentOS directly on drives on such a card, without needing a build box...
You'd have to rebuild the installer with a newer kernel like 2.6.12.3. I had tried to patch the ATA support in before, and it was a bit of a PITA. But I am running my SR5000 card in a Fedora Core 4 test system, using five (5) Seagate 7200.8 200GB drives. Thing moves data like I've _never_ seen.
I'm using my SR5000 for a prototype multimedia server in my house.
I was looking at them as a cheaper alternative to a 3ware cards for my MythTV/file server with an array of three drives. The problem with the NetCell cards not having a monitoring tool to tell if a drive fails makes it much less attractive.
Maybe they will release the tools by the time CentOS 5 comes out and I can migrate from FC2 to that ... maybe V4L with be built in EL5 by that time.
Paul