Hello,
I would like some advice on a SATA RAID controller that is able to work in a 32 bit/33mhz PCI slot. I have been looking for a while but all I can find is 64 bit cards that cost over $300. I just need it to mirror 2 drives, and of course work in Centos 4.2. I am not looking for RAID 5 or anything like that. All the cards I find that would do this are fakeraid.
Also, has anyone used the SATA Iomega Rev drive in Centos 4.2? Mine does not show up but it works on a default load of Suse 9.3...?
Any help would be great.
On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 09:26:27PM -0600, Isreal Varela enlightened us:
I would like some advice on a SATA RAID controller that is able to work in a 32 bit/33mhz PCI slot. I have been looking for a while but all I can find is 64 bit cards that cost over $300. I just need it to mirror 2 drives, and of course work in Centos 4.2. I am not looking for RAID 5 or anything like that. All the cards I find that would do this are fakeraid.
3ware 8006-2LP. Should be about $130. It's 64-bit/66MHz but will work in a 32-bit slot. See http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/Motherboard_compatibility_list_2006_01.pdf
Also, has anyone used the SATA Iomega Rev drive in Centos 4.2? Mine does not show up but it works on a default load of Suse 9.3...?
Can't help you there.
Matt
On Thursday 09 February 2006 19:46, Matt Hyclak wrote:
I would like some advice on a SATA RAID controller that is able to work in a 32 bit/33mhz PCI slot. I have been looking for a while but all I can find is 64 bit cards that cost over $300. I just need it to mirror 2 drives, and of course work in Centos 4.2. I am not looking for RAID 5 or anything like that. All the cards I find that would do this are fakeraid.
Any particular reason why you're not using Linux Software RAID? Having had to swap RAID arrays in a hurry to alien hardware, using standard IDE and software RAID was a lifesaver for me!
-Ben
Benjamin Smith wrote:
On Thursday 09 February 2006 19:46, Matt Hyclak wrote:
I would like some advice on a SATA RAID controller that is able to work in a 32 bit/33mhz PCI slot. I have been looking for a while but all I can find is 64 bit cards that cost over $300. I just need it to mirror 2 drives, and of course work in Centos 4.2. I am not looking for RAID 5 or anything like that. All the cards I find that would do this are fakeraid.
Any particular reason why you're not using Linux Software RAID? Having had to swap RAID arrays in a hurry to alien hardware, using standard IDE and software RAID was a lifesaver for me!
-Ben
I always thought hardware RAID was the way to go, Seems cleaner to me. Just used to doing it that way in the Microsoft world I guess.
-Izzy
On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 01:12 -0600, Isreal Varela wrote:
Benjamin Smith wrote:
On Thursday 09 February 2006 19:46, Matt Hyclak wrote:
I would like some advice on a SATA RAID controller that is able to work in a 32 bit/33mhz PCI slot. I have been looking for a while but all I can find is 64 bit cards that cost over $300. I just need it to mirror 2 drives, and of course work in Centos 4.2. I am not looking for RAID 5 or anything like that. All the cards I find that would do this are fakeraid.
Any particular reason why you're not using Linux Software RAID? Having had to swap RAID arrays in a hurry to alien hardware, using standard IDE and software RAID was a lifesaver for me!
-Ben
I always thought hardware RAID was the way to go, Seems cleaner to me. Just used to doing it that way in the Microsoft world I guess.
----- Traditionally a hardware RAID consisted of SCSI drives on systems with slower bus speeds and you could actually improve performance but you are talking about low end, SATA stuff on machines with higher bus speeds and you really aren't getting improved performance and to get a true hardware RAID SATA controller probably will push you out of the 'entry server hardware' category. Recognize that the lower end SATA RAID controllers aren't truly hardware RAID but are software RAID (Brian calls them fake RAID or fRAID) and for simplicity it's typically better to just use software RAID.
Craig
Isreal Varela wrote:
I always thought hardware RAID was the way to go, Seems cleaner to me. Just used to doing it that way in the Microsoft world I guess.
Welcome to the club. I used to feel the same way, mainly based on software RAID experiences I had back in the Redhat 6.2 era.
I posted to the list a few months ago and got some very interesting (and conflicting) answers. On the balance, I decided that for my needs, software RAID is probably best.
Though it does depend upon your exact situation, I suppose. E.g., while supported, I think RAID 5 has performance isssues under pretty much any software RAID implementation. (And I'm sure someone will correct me if I am in error. ;-)
I have several machines with a Dell (LSI) ide RAID controller that LSI just decided not to port from kernel 2.4 to 2.6. Although it has now been ported by the community, it has never really regained its status a first class citizen. It's possible to make it work, but every kernel upgrade breaks it again. My plan is to be rid of all of these "unsupported" cards by next October and run software RAID on all my machines.
-Steve
Steve Bergman wrote:
I have several machines with a Dell (LSI) ide RAID controller that LSI just decided not to port from kernel 2.4 to 2.6. Although it has now been ported by the community, it has never really regained its status a first class citizen. It's possible to make it work, but every kernel upgrade breaks it again. My plan is to be rid of all of these "unsupported" cards by next October and run software RAID on all my machines.
Sorry to reply to myself, but my post suggested a question. I have been planning on doing a clean install to move from hardware raid to software. The plan is to move from Fedora 4 with hardware raid to CentOS 5 with software raid in September. However, I suppose there is a way to move from a CERC 4ch/ATA100 comtroller using the old "megaraid.ko" module running RAID 1 with 2 drives, to software RAID 1, simply by moving the IDE cables and editing some config files.
Does anyone have a recipe handy?
Thanks, Steve
Hello Steve,
Sunday, February 12, 2006, 9:34:26 AM, you wrote:
I have several machines with a Dell (LSI) ide RAID controller that LSI just decided not to port from kernel 2.4 to 2.6. Although it has now been ported by the community, it has never really regained its status a first class citizen. It's possible to make it work, but every kernel
I have been searching for these drivers and haven't had much luck yet, can you tell me where you found the "community" copy? I only have one right now and do plan on ridding myself of it, but for the moment have to support it.
Thanks, jer
Jerry57 (GMail) wrote:
Hello Steve,
Sunday, February 12, 2006, 9:34:26 AM, you wrote:
I have several machines with a Dell (LSI) ide RAID controller that LSI just decided not to port from kernel 2.4 to 2.6. Although it has now been ported by the community, it has never really regained its status a first class citizen. It's possible to make it work, but every kernel
I have been searching for these drivers and haven't had much luck yet, can you tell me where you found the "community" copy? I only have one right now and do plan on ridding myself of it, but for the moment have to support it.
Thanks, jer
Well, my experience is with FC2/FC3/FC4. (Yes, it's been going on that long!)
There is an installation driver disk, released by someone, possibly Dave Jones, for FC3 and FC4. To be honest, the machines that I have that require the driver are all behind hardware firewalls and the local users are trusted, so I have just continued to use the same kernel, skipping updates on these machines. So I don't remember where to go to get the disk. Anyway, that's fedora anyway.
However, this page:
http://www.tuxyturvy.com/blog/index.php?/archives/4-Installing-RHEL4-on-Syst...
may be of help to you.
-Steve
Hello Steve,
Sunday, February 12, 2006, 10:10:44 AM, you wrote:
However, this page:
http://www.tuxyturvy.com/blog/index.php?/archives/4-Installing-RHEL4-on-Syst...
may be of help to you.
Thanks, will check it out!
jer
Isreal Varela wrote:
Benjamin Smith wrote:
On Thursday 09 February 2006 19:46, Matt Hyclak wrote:
I would like some advice on a SATA RAID controller that is able to work in a 32 bit/33mhz PCI slot. I have been looking for a while but all I can find is 64 bit cards that cost over $300. I just need it to mirror 2 drives, and of course work in Centos 4.2. I am not looking for RAID 5 or anything like that. All the cards I find that would do this are fakeraid.
Any particular reason why you're not using Linux Software RAID? Having had to swap RAID arrays in a hurry to alien hardware, using standard IDE and software RAID was a lifesaver for me! -Ben
I always thought hardware RAID was the way to go, Seems cleaner to me. Just used to doing it that way in the Microsoft world I guess.
I have used software RAID in production on and off since 1998-ish using RAID 0/1/5/10. To date, I've never had one fail "ungracefully" and haven't had any performance issues to speak of. However, for the past 5 years or so, I've used mostly hardware RAID with an emphasis on 3Ware IDE cards. They just plain work and it is a lot easier if you don't have the time/energy to keep up with the latest comings and goings in the software RAID corner of the Linux world. They are also not THAT expensive.
Lately, I've gotten to like the Highpoint RocketRAID 2224 and 2240 PCI-X cards since they have multi-lane connectors and support SATA II. The multilane connectors have made it easy for me to deploy external tanks of SATA II 500gig Seagate drives for video editing applications. The 2224 also has the benefit of being OSX friendly if you've got the need to support that in addition to Linux and Winders.
If one of the lower end 3Ware cards is too expensive for your application, I wouldn't worry too much about deploying software RAID. It works and it's pretty painless to set up with the CentOS installer. Just make sure you budget a bit of your cpu power to deal with the overhead and that you test updates before you roll them out to a server that's doing real work (Tm).
Cheers,
On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 01:12, Isreal Varela wrote:
I would like some advice on a SATA RAID controller that is able to work in a 32 bit/33mhz PCI slot. I have been looking for a while but all I can find is 64 bit cards that cost over $300. I just need it to mirror 2 drives, and of course work in Centos 4.2. I am not looking for RAID 5 or anything like that. All the cards I find that would do this are fakeraid.
Any particular reason why you're not using Linux Software RAID? Having had to swap RAID arrays in a hurry to alien hardware, using standard IDE and software RAID was a lifesaver for me!
I always thought hardware RAID was the way to go, Seems cleaner to me. Just used to doing it that way in the Microsoft world I guess.
Hardware is better for raid5 where some computation is required. For raid1 it is just a matter of having drives that can execute commands concurrently. That is, using 2 drives on the same IDE controller would be a bad idea, but SCSI is OK and SATA only permits one drive per controller anyway. There is not a lot of CPU overhead in mirroring.
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Benjamin Smith -
Chris Mauritz -
Craig White -
Isreal Varela -
Jerry57 (GMail) -
Les Mikesell -
Matt Hyclak -
Steve Bergman