On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 18:29 -0800, Bryan J. Smith wrote: > Ugo Bellavance <ugob at 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