[Tfug] SATA controller that plays well with others

[Ronald Sutherland]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Ronald Sutherland <
ronald.sutherland at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Paul Steinbach <MIS at samlevitz.com> wrote:
>
>> I am setting up a cheap, low power file/print server for a friend.  I
>> will use a low end Celeron or P3 whatever I have lying around.  I will
>> likely run the OS off an IDE drive and put the data on mirrored SATA
>> drives.  I started with a cheap SATA card and found it completed ignored
>> by Xubuntu 6.06, 7.10, DSL 4.3 and Knoppix 5.0.  Can anyone recommend an
>> under $50 SATA controller card recognized by most Linux distros?  It
>> would be great if I could boot from it as well.  I am fairly distro
>> agnostic....
>>
>> --
>> Paul Steinbach
>>
>>
> I was having SATA problems on an Intel mobo until I tried Ubuntu 8.04 (it
> was PATA or Windows for that one... until now).
>
> If you have an older mobo it should have 2 PATA connectors, and you could
> put 4 drives on that. For example the file server I'm using at the moment
> has a system drive, two mirroring drives and 1 cdrom on the two PATA
> connectors. I don't want speed just something fairly safe, I back it up with
> rsync some times to a wreck of a computer, when I feel the need. Anyway I've
> had fair luck with setting the master drive on PATA0 as the system drive
> (/root, boot, swap...) and  the master drive on PATA1 as the cdrom. I set
> both mirrors for slave mode which adds clues if I can smash the drive with a
> hammer or be very kind to it when the server is disembowel. I can also build
> another pile of scrap up and add those drives if some hardware fails (like
> Capacitors...).
>
> I should add that now days I setup the raid after system is up and running,
thus the mirror drives are not even in the system during install. And a cut-
past of my notes:

        Setup of RAID after install is a little tricky. I've not found any
    GUI tools for this but the command line is long lived. I let Linux raid
    auto detect partition type. I set /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdd1 same size with
    cfdisk, which is interactive, so just run it with the drives to
partition
    in place and running.

            sudo cfdisk /dev/sd[bd]

    Set the partitions, and select type FD (Linux raid autodetc). The
following
    starts the raid process.

            sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 -n 2 /dev/sdb1 missing

    This formats the file system as ext3, which is what I use.

            sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0

    Make sure to cfdisk the second drive also, same as first (FD).

            sudo mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdd1

    Add /dev/md0 to /etc/fstab since I'm not using LVM (its not mounted at
boot).
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