[Tfug] sata raid support

[Harry McGregor]

For low end raids (and all of those cards are low end...), I would
strongly suggest you look at linux software raid instead.

All of the low end cards tend to put most of the work in the driver
anyway, and have enough firmware to get the raid bootable for the
windows driver to take over.

Even for high end raids we are starting to use linux software raid at my
office.

Many mid range cards don't support RAID6, and we have started moving
over to it from RAID5.

Linux has software support for almost any raid setup you could imagine. 
We are doing a RAID6 of 15 750GB drives, with one as a hot spare (14
drives in the raid), raid 6 gives you the ability to have any two drives
fail.

I would suggest cheap simple silicon image sata cards, then do a RAID1
(across all drives) for your OS install, and a RAID 5 or RAID 6 (debian
installer will only do raid 5, you have to do raid 6 after the install
instead) for you data.

4 port PCI card = $20
http://www.gogocost.com/xcart/catalog/Serial-ATA-SATA-4-Port-RAID-PCI-Controller-Host-Card-Adapter-p-293.html



Ammon Lauritzen wrote:
> I relish these moments. Newbie question time.
>
> It looks like I get to help somebody build a big fat sata raid-5 and
> have two questions that other people probably know the answers to.
>
> 1 - Does anyone have experience with either:
>       Promise FastTrak TX4310
>     or
>       HighPoint RocketRaid 1740/1742
>     controllers? I see that Promise has some sort of open source wrapper
> around a proprietary driver where HighPoint theoretically has open
> drivers... but I remember bad experiences several years ago where simply
> turning on (what I think was) a HighPoint controller prevented my kernel
> (2.4.10ish) from booting.
>
> 2 - I'm not terribly familiar with SATA. Like... I've not touched a
> drive since they were still fairly new. How easily can one plug X+
> devices into an X-port card? Is it like ATA where you have exactly 2
> channels per interface, or is it more like SCSI or USB?
Sata is point to point (unless you use one of the new sata switches, but
you probably won't need that), thus one port on the card = one drive.

We are using 16 port High Point cards for our two large raid servers.

                                     Harry
> Ammon

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