[Tfug] sata raid support

[Jon]

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?
>>     
I'm using a HighPoint 1820A (8 port SATA) in a CentOS 4.2 box. It has 
it's own XOR processor for RAID 5 configurations but other than that 
it's a 'fake RAID' as far as I can tell. It's performed well for me.

To answer at least one of your questions, SATA is one-to-one. One drive 
per port.

--
Jon