[CentOS] real SATA RAID

Tue Feb 10 00:55:55 UTC 2009
Christopher Chan <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>

/me puts on salamander suit.

Hal Martin wrote:
> As many people have stated in this thread, 3ware and Areca make some
> good hardware RAID solutions.

I don't know about Areca but 3ware certainly. I have never come across 
issues with any 3ware boards hardware-wise. I suppose you have an 
opinion about Adaptec 2405 and its other new lines of real hardware cards?

> 
> Software RAID using mdadm works too, quite well, I might add. I was one
> of those people who stayed away from software RAID in linux, thinking it
> was too complicated and difficult, I was wrong. It's dead easy to do,
> and expanding your disks can be done on the fly (if you have a SATA
> controller that supports hotplugging as many these days do.) Perhaps the
> best thing about software RAID, in my opinion, is that it's light enough
> on the machine that a PIII server can be reading/writing to the array at
> 10MB/s.

The guy asked for real hardware raid card suggestions. You can preach 
all you like about software raid, there are cases where hardware raid 
cards with sufficient resources will offer better value.

> 
> Now you might say, 10MB/s, who cares? That's small stuff. But, when
> that's the load the network infrastructure at this location was designed
> to handle, you don't need anything higher performance.

I don't know about you but where I work, one of the first infrastructure 
issues I dealt with was upgrading from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit. The 
teachers all appreciate their logins running faster, the loading of 
their multi-megabyte powerpoints being faster, their on-disk gallery of 
school trip pictures loading faster, etc. In this age of files being 
megabytes in size even hundreds, a ten megabyte/sec network does not fly 
anymore.

BTW, I use raidz so as I do not need to hit anything over 100MB yet and 
2 TB storage is sufficient for the moment. Good luck trying to get a 
controller card that has 8 ports or more without even a fakeraid bios. I 
am so happy that there are many motherboards that come with 4 SATA ports 
and work under Linux. But find one that also has a PCIe 4x slot is a 
pain in the neck.

> 
> Just my two cents.
> -Hal
> 
> Christopher Chan wrote:
>> Paolo Supino wrote:
>>   
>>> Hi 
>>>
>>>   Last week I had a lengthy thread in which someone indicated the my SIL 
>>> card is a FRAID (don't know if F stands for the F word or Fake, though 
>>> it doesn't really matter). I want to replace the controller with a 
>>> controller that Linux will see the RAID1 group as a single HD and not 
>>> multiple HDs as it happens with the SIL controller. Recommendations anyone? 
>>>
>>>     
>> Adaptec RAID 2405, 3ware, Areca
>>
>>
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