There have been several threads about SATA in the past weeks and the problems with it. I'm still not clear, though, if SATA in general is a problem or just specific functionality or hardware. Do I understand correctly that "mainboard built-in" SATA RAID is a nono on CentOS? That I would need a third-party RAID card for this? What about SATA non-RAID or SATA2? Is SATA supposed to work in general or do the disks need to run in IDE mode? Do I generally need drivers from the hardware (mainboard, chipset) vendor or is "normal" SATA supposed to work with the packaged drivers?
Kai
Kai Schaetzl wrote:
There have been several threads about SATA in the past weeks and the problems with it. I'm still not clear, though, if SATA in general is a problem or just specific functionality or hardware.
specific hardware.
Do I understand correctly that "mainboard built-in" SATA RAID is a nono on CentOS? That I would need a third-party RAID card for this? What about SATA non-RAID or SATA2? Is SATA supposed to work in general or do the disks need to run in IDE mode? Do I generally need drivers from the hardware (mainboard, chipset) vendor or is "normal" SATA supposed to work with the packaged drivers?
there is no such thing as sata support, as a blanket cover. you need to make sure that the specific chipset / controller is supported ( sort of like Scsi works ).
- KB
Karanbir Singh wrote on Fri, 19 May 2006 13:34:34 +0100:
there is no such thing as sata support, as a blanket cover. you need to make sure that the specific chipset / controller is supported ( sort of like Scsi works ).
Thank you both for the answers. I suppose there's a supported hardware/driver list somewhere on the Red Hat site for RHEL4 that I can use for CentOS 4?
Kai
Kai Schaetzl wrote:
Karanbir Singh wrote on Fri, 19 May 2006 13:34:34 +0100:
there is no such thing as sata support, as a blanket cover. you need to make sure that the specific chipset / controller is supported ( sort of like Scsi works ).
Thank you both for the answers. I suppose there's a supported hardware/driver list somewhere on the Red Hat site for RHEL4 that I can use for CentOS 4?
If you're going to do software RAID, the cheapest/easiest method would be to use any SATA controller based on the Silicon Image 31XX chipsets. It works right out of the box with 4.3. I've had issues with the following other chipsets not being properly recognized:
Intel ICH5 Serverworks HT1000
Cheers,
On 5/19/06, Kai Schaetzl maillists@conactive.com wrote:
Thank you both for the answers. I suppose there's a supported hardware/driver list somewhere on the Red Hat site for RHEL4 that I can use for CentOS 4?
No need. There's only one good vendor for SATA RAID: AMCC (formerly 3Ware). All their cards work under RH/FC/CentOS.
No need. There's only one good vendor for SATA RAID: AMCC (formerly
3Ware). All their cards work under RH/FC/CentOS.
II'm running two Dell boxes (PowerEdge SC1425), both with SATA disks and software RAID. These boxes use the Intel SATA controller. No problems to date - both perform well under load.
JH
areca's are also very nice and they have RHEL4-Ux drivers available.
Francois Caen wrote:
On 5/19/06, Kai Schaetzl maillists@conactive.com wrote:
Thank you both for the answers. I suppose there's a supported hardware/driver list somewhere on the Red Hat site for RHEL4 that I can use for CentOS 4?
No need. There's only one good vendor for SATA RAID: AMCC (formerly 3Ware). All their cards work under RH/FC/CentOS.
Kai Schaetzl wrote:
Thank you both for the answers. I suppose there's a supported hardware/driver list somewhere on the Red Hat site for RHEL4 that I can use for CentOS 4?
I'm using an LSI mega-raid 150 SATA adapter on a CentOS 4.2 x86_64 smp installation. It worked out of the box with 4-320GB drives. I had to use CentOS-plus to get the xfs filesystem though.
Thanks to all the later answers. I've read them all and appreciate them very much. I'm not much smarter than before on this, but this seems to lie in the nature of this subject. I'll certainly will inquire the hell out of the vendor we finally by it from :-)
Kai
Kai Schaetzl wrote:
Thanks to all the later answers. I've read them all and appreciate them very much. I'm not much smarter than before on this, but this seems to lie in the nature of this subject. I'll certainly will inquire the hell out of the vendor we finally by it from :-)
I've always found the descriptions at the top of the Linux SATA RAID faq helpfull.
http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html
-Shawn
On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 02:31:17PM +0200, Kai Schaetzl enlightened us:
There have been several threads about SATA in the past weeks and the problems with it. I'm still not clear, though, if SATA in general is a problem or just specific functionality or hardware. Do I understand correctly that "mainboard built-in" SATA RAID is a nono on CentOS? That I would need a third-party RAID card for this? What about SATA non-RAID or SATA2? Is SATA supposed to work in general or do the disks need to run in IDE mode? Do I generally need drivers from the hardware (mainboard, chipset) vendor or is "normal" SATA supposed to work with the packaged drivers?
It really depends on your motherboard/chipset. I have several motherboards where the onboard SATA works just fine. Disks show up as a scsi disk.
The "Onboard RAID" really isn't onboard, just a few extra hooks into the BIOS that software drivers can use. This is necessary for Windows since there is no true software RAID support, so they came up with this half-cooked idea. It is possible to use these Pseudo-RAID devices with the latest device mapper (dm) code in Linux, but generally speaking it's more effective and stable to just use the built-in software RAID. If you are dual-booting a machine, then you might look at the dm option. Hardware RAID is definitely easier. A 2 port 3ware 8006-2LP should only run about $130 US, and a 4 port 9550sx-4LP is in the $250 range.
Some of the latest boards need extra drivers to work in older kernels. I expect RH patches those in as best they can, but there may still be some lag.
Matt
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Chris Mauritz -
Francois Caen -
JackHammer19 -
Kai Schaetzl -
Karanbir Singh -
Matt Hyclak -
Shawn K. O'Shea -
Tom Elsesser -
William Warren