Am Fr, den 15.04.2005 schrieb Franki um 19:11:
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?
From what I can tell from googling, this is more or less where RHEL stands: Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 3 and the current version of Fedora support the following SATA chipsets:
Intel's ICH5 SATA chipset Silicon Image's SATA chipset
Those are no hardware RAID controllers. They are 'winraid' / 'fake raid' as it is BIOS supported software RAID. If you want real hardware RAID have a look at 3Ware's products.
Does CentOS4 add anything to this as it is based on 2.6 kernel?
Kernel 2.6 too supports 3Ware controllers well.
My question upon reading what I found on Google, is if it is true hardware raid, shouldn't the OS not be able to tell it's raid at all?
Right, the system sees 1 drive rather than the independent drives. Thats the difference between hardware RAID and software RAID.
I'm assuming that the chipsets listed above are driver based hardware raid? what I am after is a raid array based on true hardware raid such that the OS see's just one drive, and the hardware firmware handles any mirror/striping.
Correct :)
Any suggestions?
Yes, 3Ware - from small controllers to those with RAID5 capability and several SATA connectors. ICP Vortex may be a good choice too. The stories about Adaptec controllers do not invite to be interested in them.
Franki
Alexander