Lee W wrote:
Hi Everyone,
Has anyone had any experience of using the Promise FastTrak SX4000 or SuperTrak SX6000 IDE RAID Controllers under Centos (if it matters I'm using version 4). I've seen it listed on linuxcompatible.org as working but would prefer to find out any first-hand experince before I buy.
I'm looking to build a new mini server based on Mini-ITX and have found a great 1U case that support upto 4 IDE drives. It would be good to muck around with hardware RAID.
If not, can anyone suggest another make of RAID Controller that will support upto 4 IDE RAIDS (preferably with support for RAID 5). And is also available in the UK.
I don't have any experience with the Promise card, but I can highly recommend any recent vintage 3Ware RAID card. They're not terribly expensive and the new 9500 4 port cards should be tiny enough to easily fit in a mini-ITX case. That card plus 4 400gig drives would give you a 4 disk RAID 5 array (with very good read/write performance) and well over a terabyte of usable storage. It wasn't long ago that a 10gig drive was as big as a shoebox and now you can fit over a terabyte of redundant storage and a fairly powerful computer in the same form factor. We live in interesting times.
Cheers,
C